Arguably the most important objective in professional services is to deliver consistently high client satisfaction. When a firm has a reputation for excellent client satisfaction, many aspects of running the business get easier over time. Current clients engage in follow-on projects, new prospects reach out, client referrals happen regularly, references are glowing, it’s easier to land key hires, revenue keeps growing, and so on. But when the firm becomes known for poor outcomes and dissatisfied clients, the boulder gets heavier and the hill gets steeper.

Defining Client Satisfaction

As important as client satisfaction is to all professional services firms, it is surprising how few firm leaders actually know how to define it. Ask a services firm CEO to define client satisfaction and you will likely hear something about “delivering a high-quality work product”. While quality is certainly important to any business, it isn’t the whole story when it comes to client satisfaction.

Client satisfaction is the difference between the realized experience and the expected experience.

There are two important distinctions with this definition. First, satisfaction is not simply the client’s evaluation of the work product; it is the evaluation of the entire experience. Second, satisfaction is entirely dependent on expectations. Let’s discuss both of these in more detail.

The quality of the work product alone is just one element of the client’s experience. Experience is about much more than technical execution and proficiency. To determine whether or not your firm is delivering a high-quality experience, ask the following questions about your most recent significant engagement:

• Did you provide meeting materials (i.e. presentation slides, documents, etc.) to client team members at least one day in advance of every meeting or call?
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• Did the project manager send detailed status reports on time every week of the engagement?
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• Did the project manager walk the client sponsor through each status report over the phone or in person?
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• Did the CEO, or another senior leader of your firm, call in to (or preferably visit) the project sponsor every couple of months to check in, get feedback, and offer assistance?
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• Were emails received from the client responded to within a couple of hours at most?
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• Was your project manager available for those occasional afterhours client calls to address pressing questions?
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• Did your team engage in regular face-to-face meetings with the client or communicate via email and phone calls?
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These types of questions relate to the client’s overall experience and not just the delivered work product. A high-quality work product is merely table stakes. Experience is what drives client satisfaction.

Now that we’ve covered the experience, let’s move on to expectations. As an example, let’s say you hire a painter to paint your house and you pay $2,000. You expect the painter to paint the siding, trim, and shutters for that price, and you need the work to be done by next weekend. The painter finishes the job three days late and when you inspect the work, you realize that the shutters and trim weren’t painted at all. The experience you realized was far worse than the experience you expected. The result of that will always be low satisfaction – regardless of the industry.

But what if you had hired a painter just to paint your siding for $1,000. For that low price, you wouldn’t expect any other painting to be done. Let’s say he completes the work in a single day and, when you examine the house, you realize the trim and shutters have also been painted. You didn’t expect that at all, and you’re so thrilled that you tip the painter an extra $200 and refer him to all of your neighbors. By exceeding your expectations, the painter ensured high client satisfaction and earned a lot more work in your neighborhood.

Setting clear expectations and managing those expectations are at the nucleus of every leading professional services firm. You simply cannot have a sustainable high-performance firm without consistently setting and managing expectations well. Since project managers have the greatest impact on both experience and expectations, the quality of the firm tends to mirror the quality of the project management team.