Accounting practices lose revenue by failing to understand clients – study

A new report from HLB International points to insufficient client understanding as the key source of ‘revenue leakage’ in accounting and advisory practices.

HLB, a global network of independent accounting and advisory practices, worked with customer experience specialist McorpCX to produce sector-focused insight and guidance.

The joint report, titled Stopping Revenue Leakage, sets out research findings alongside practical guidance.

It examines how structured client listening can support businesses and how client insight can be systematically converted into commercial outcomes.

The study combines McorpCX’s XOS Pulse maturity data with interviews with leaders from organisations across HLB’s network.

It looks at how companies collect feedback, what they do with client insight, and how they link client experience to retention, pricing, account growth and differentiation.

HLB chief marketing officer Lesley Hornung said: “Most firms have some way of tracking client satisfaction, but far fewer have disciplined systems in place to understand whether the experience is actually contributing to retention, referrals, pricing confidence and additional work.”

XOS Pulse benchmarks companies on a 0–100 scale.

One key conclusion is that, while most professional services operators are strongly focused on providing what they see as a “high-quality” service, fewer are equally focused on client listening and understanding as a way to prevent revenue leakage.

The report identifies four causes of revenue leakage: clients moving advisory work to competitors; rising difficulty justifying fees; untapped opportunities within existing accounts; and being viewed as interchangeable despite delivering good work.

According to XOS Pulse, professional services companies have an average customer experience (CX) maturity score of 57.9.

Capabilities are weaker in areas tied to client understanding, including experience mapping, unifying client data, insight generation, segmentation and client listening.

By contrast, the average global XOS score across all sectors, including professional services, is 62.5.

In the specific area of client understanding, professional services companies record an average score of 50.6, indicating significant room for improvement.

McorpCX president Michael Hinshaw said: “Client listening is not about collecting better satisfaction scores. It is about understanding what clients value, where revenue is at risk and where the next opportunity may be hiding.”