About a third of discovery calls end with "we're not the right help for this." This page is the long version — the seven scenarios we specifically won't take, why we won't, and where to find better-fitting help instead. Read it before you book.
A consulting engagement that takes someone's money without producing useful work for them is, structurally, fraud. We try not to commit fraud.
The seven scenarios below are the patterns where we've watched engagements fail — for our work specifically, given the way we work. Other consultants may legitimately succeed where we wouldn't. The point isn't that these scenarios are unfixable; it's that we're not the right tool for them, and saying so out loud is cheaper for everyone than discovering it three weeks into an SOW.
Read these as patterns, not as rigid disqualifiers. If you're a borderline match on one of them, the discovery call is still worth having — sometimes the borderline cases turn out fine. The clear ones are the ones we stop early.
If you don't yet have a stable product and a customer base that's growing because they want what you sell, customer service consulting is premature. The customer service operation isn't your bottleneck. Product-market fit is.
An audit of your customer service operation at this stage would surface real issues — but those issues aren't what's holding the company back. Spending $2,500 on a CS audit when you should be spending it on customer interviews to validate the product is a misallocation.
Talk to customers directly. Cancel the consulting budget for now. When you have a product customers are pulling for and service load that's actually growing, come back.
Below five agents, the operating problems aren't program-shaped — they're process and tooling-shaped. You don't need a calibrated 20-item QA scorecard for two people; you need a help-desk tool and a written response standard.
A productized engagement at this scale is over-engineered. The investment would be real; the output wouldn't be proportional to what your operation can absorb.
Use the free resources — the health check, the scorecard builder, and the guides. The blog covers most of what's relevant at your scale. When you're past 5–7 agents, the productized engagements become worth it.
If your customer service operation is on fire today — CSAT collapse, churn spike, executive escalation, public PR incident — what you need is someone in the room solving the crisis, not a six-week diagnostic.
Our engagements are designed for steady-state operations with structural gaps. They produce thoughtful, durable programs. They don't produce emergency triage. Trying to use them as emergency triage would waste both of our time.
Stabilize the crisis first — internally, with a temporary contractor, or with a fractional CS leader who can be hands-on this week. When you're back to a level where the question is "how do we prevent this next time," that's when the audit becomes useful.
Our engagements build capability. We design programs, we train your trainer, we hand it off, and we step back. The deliverables are owned by your team and run by your team after the engagement ends.
If what you actually want is for someone external to take over running your customer service operation — to be the QA program, not to build one — you're describing a different engagement structure than ours. A fractional CS leader or an outsourced operation would fit you better.
If you want ongoing CS leadership, you want a fractional CS leader. If you want outsourced operations, you want a BPO. We can recommend specific people for either path — email info@consumercoresolutions.com.
If the CEO thinks the issue is training, the VP thinks it's tooling, and the CFO thinks it's headcount, an audit will surface the truth — but the report will contradict at least one of those leaders. If the politics around that disagreement are strong enough that the report will get buried or fought rather than acted on, we've spent your money to confirm what you already knew.
We'd rather wait until alignment exists than produce a report that becomes a political artifact.
Do the alignment work first. Get leadership to agree on the question, even if you don't yet have the answer. The audit becomes much more useful when the leadership team is ready to act on what it finds.
If your operation is genuinely constrained — frozen headcount, no implementation budget, executive priorities firmly elsewhere — you may not be in a position to act on recommendations once you have them. The audit would produce real insight, and then the insight would sit in a Drive folder for nine months.
This isn't a "you're not good enough" situation. It's a timing situation. Bring in outside help when there's a window to actually do something with what you learn.
Wait until the budget cycle when implementation is feasible. Use the free resources in the meantime to build the internal business case. The CS ROI Calculator and the business case post are designed to help with exactly that.
Our engagements are sized for SMB and mid-market operations: 5–50 customer service agents, fixed-fee productized engagements under $15K, 3–6 week timelines. If you're a 200-person operation looking for a multi-quarter, multi-region, six-figure transformation — that's a different shape of consulting practice than ours, and you'd be paying a premium price for the wrong fit.
The frameworks scale up, but the engagement model doesn't. Larger transformations need larger teams, more senior strategic involvement, and longer time horizons than we're built for.
Bain Customer Strategy & Marketing, Accenture Song, Slalom CX, or one of the boutique firms specializing in CX transformations at scale. Different price band, different methodology, appropriate for the size of problem you're solving.
Three reasons. They're worth being explicit about.
A poorly-fit consulting engagement burns budget, drains team time, produces orphaned deliverables, and quietly damages internal credibility for outside help in the future. If we take on work that won't land, we're not just wasting your $2,500 — we're costing the next consultant you might want to hire too.
Consultants who take whoever shows up almost always end up in the wrong engagements. The way to avoid the wrong engagements is to be visibly willing to walk away from them. This page exists partly so we don't have to make that decision under pressure on a discovery call — the filter happens before the call.
The case studies page doesn't have failed engagements on it because we don't take engagements that are structurally set up to fail. That's not luck. That's selectivity. We'd rather have a small portfolio of work that produced clear outcomes than a large portfolio of mixed results.
The inverse of the seven scenarios above. Read these as a checklist.
You have a working product and customers who want to keep using it. Customer service is now a real lever, not premature optimization.
Operations in this range benefit most from productized engagement structures. Smaller is too thin; larger needs a different consulting shape.
You're not on fire. You're operating, you've spotted (or suspect) a structural gap, and you want to address it without flailing.
The audit's recommendations have an owner. The QA program has a QA Lead. The training program has an internal trainer. Without an owner, the engagement orphans on delivery.
Even if you don't yet have the answer, you're agreed that the question is worth answering. The audit's job is to find the answer, not to mediate a leadership disagreement.
If we recommend a QA build, you can decide whether to fund it. If we recommend headcount changes, the executive who'd authorize that is in the room.
Then the next step is the 30-minute discovery call. We'll confirm fit together, and if we're wrong on either side, we'll know in the first ten minutes and stop wasting your time.