When I speak with leaders of services firms after they've conducted client research, they almost always assume that their satisfaction scores are perfectly fine. “We have all 4s and 5s,” they say, as if to dismiss the conversation on that subject because they're in such good shape. Many service providers shoot for getting either a “4” (somewhat satisfied) or a “5” (very satisfied) out of 5 on their client satisfaction scores, and expect that this is all they need to do.

They're wrong.

According to the nearly 200 buyers of professional services whom we surveyed in RainToday's research study How Clients Buy, getting a “4” is not nearly enough to keep them as clients.

In the survey, not only did we ask the buyers of professional services how satisfied they are with their current providers, but we also asked them how likely they would be to consider switching to a new provider over the next two years.

We considered “switchers” to be anyone who said they were “very likely,” “somewhat likely,” or “neither likely nor unlikely” to switch providers in the next two years. To us, anyone not expressing some degree of loyalty to current providers were wide open to selling overtures from other firms. In other words, they'd switch if something better were to come along.

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