“What percentage of your clients could explain the technical difference between your work and another firm’s?”
That’s the question I opened my Boomer Circle Summit session with. Most of the room guessed low, but research from CX Pilots says it’s even lower, coming in at just 17%. Since accounting is a credence good, a client cannot evaluate the quality of the work even after they receive it. They don’t know if the return is right or the audit was thorough, and they aren’t qualified to know. That’s why they hire you in the first place.
So they go on trust.
For decades that was a comfortable place to sit, with retention for top-tier firms hovering around 90%. Clients can’t judge the work, they trust you, and leaving is a hassle, so they stay. This led to my next question, which was a harder one to reckon with.
“How much of that is clients who love you, and how much is clients who can’t face the pain of switching?”
Retention built on friction is deferred churn, and three forces are working on that friction right now.
Leaving used to be hard
My wife is a CPA, and we run a marketing agency for accounting firms together. When we swapped accounting firms, it was a huge headache. We dug up prior-year information, moved history over, and explained our business from scratch.
That pain is going away. Walk any exhibit hall this year and you’ll find products built to make switching easy, from data extraction to AI-assisted migration, and every bit of pain someone removes from switching is a bit of protection removed from your client list. What’s left protecting it is how clients feel about working with you.
There’s new money hunting your clients
By early 2026, roughly half of the top 30 US firms had private equity investment or an alternative practice structure, a number that was near zero five years ago. The efficiency phase of the PE playbook goes fast and has a floor. PE funds squeeze margins, tighten review cycles, offshore what they can, and automate the rest. Then the capital has to grow, and growth means clients, and the easiest client to win is one who already feels ignored. Easy switching plus funded business development makes your book a target in a way it hasn’t been before.
The workforce is shrinking while the work speeds up
More than 300,000 US accountants and auditors left their jobs between 2019 and 2022, a 17% drop from the profession’s peak. Accounting graduates fell another 6.6% year over year, and meanwhile the work itself is compressing, with reports of AI pilots cutting audit fieldwork time by as much as half.
Put those together and your feedback window collapses. If an engagement that took six weeks now takes three, you have half the time to notice a client is unhappy and fix it, with fewer people around to notice and less time to act.
The one thing I hope the room took with them
AI is not replacing the human touch. It’s putting a spotlight on it.
We still need reviewers and professionals who can untangle a hard tax problem. What changes is that the output is becoming a commodity, and clients couldn’t evaluate the output anyway. What they can evaluate is your judgment as they experience it, in what you noticed, what you explained, and what you anticipated before they asked.
One ten-minute call where you explain why a client’s tax position changed, and what you’d do differently next year, is worth more to them than every hour that went into the return. The return is compliance, and they expect it to be correct. Your judgment is the part they can’t get anywhere else, and it’s the part they remember.
The posts about AI wiping out this profession have it backwards. Use the technology to buy back human minutes, then spend them on the relationship. When a client is going through something hard financially, they don’t want a chatbot. They want a person who knows their business, knows their background, and can sit with them in it.
An engineer’s complaint about how firms measure this
Before building software for accountants, I did control systems automation, where we separated open-loop systems from closed-loop ones. An open loop does something and hopes the output was right, with no measurement and no correction. A closed loop does something, measures the result, and has a plan for when the measurement comes back wrong.
Most firms run client experience as an open loop. When I asked the room how they know how a client feels, the most common answer was partner gut feel, with annual surveys a distant second, and both fail in similar ways. Gut feel means the signal arrives when a partner walks in and says this client is upset, which means the client already feels that way and it’s too late. An annual survey tells you how someone remembers a year that’s over, and Kahneman showed that remembered experience and lived experience are different things. A survey only collects the memory.
It’s ironic since month-end close exists because annual close wasn’t enough, and continuous auditing exists because quarterly wasn’t enough. When the process speeds up, the measurement keeps pace, and firms apply that everywhere except the client relationship.
The moments that matter
An engagement isn’t one event. It runs in a loop, from engage, to gather, to deliver, and the moment you deliver, your client’s decision about next year is already forming.
- Engage: clear scope, clear price, clear timeline. Clients want to know what’s in and what’s out, and it protects you too, because when work creeps later you have a document to point at instead of a negotiation that eats into your realization.
- Gather: never ask twice. When I asked where clients hit the most friction, about 60% of the room said document and information requests, and the first answer for why was “things get lost in the shuffle.” When you ask for something a second time, the client doesn’t read that as “you must be busy.” They read it as, “how can I trust your work if you don’t know what I already sent you?” Add this to the five or six portals they juggle across your different service lines, and you stop feeling like one firm.
- Deliver: explain what changed and why. A PDF and a templated email checks a box, but it doesn’t deliver unique value, and it makes the invoice behind it feel heavier than it should.
Leading signals and lagging signals
Lagging signals like churn, a low satisfaction score, or complaint volume tell you the outcome. They matter, but look at what complaint volume is. We measure happiness by counting unhappiness, after the fact, and most unhappy clients never complain. They just leave.
Leading signals are data you can act on while the outcome can still change, and re-request rate is the one I’d start with. Gartner’s customer effort research found that making people repeat themselves is among the strongest drivers of disloyalty across service industries, and my argument is that a re-request is accounting’s version of it. Response time on client questions is another leading signal, and so is a simple count of how many deliverables were accompanied by an actual conversation.
Someone in the room raised a fair objection. Without a unified system, this is hard to measure. True, and it’s often manual, but do it anyway. The alternative is waiting on the lagging signals, which you’ll see with perfect clarity long after you could have done anything about them.
Four things you can do without buying anything
- Walk your own client journey. Send yourself an engagement letter and a request list, sign something, and pay an invoice. Count the logins, the portals, the password resets, and then be honest. Did that feel like a firm that’s buttoned up, or a firm that bolted one application onto the next?
- Track your re-request rate. How often does a client say “you already have this”? Even a manual tally shows you the risk sitting in your process today.
- Make the delivery moment human. For your best clients, pick up the phone and talk about what changed and what to think about next year, before the mass send goes out.
- Give every number an owner. You already do this with revenue. AR aging gets reviewed, someone follows up, and it gets resolved. That’s a closed loop you already have in place, so run one on the relationship too. If re-request rate climbs and no one owns bringing it down, you just built a dashboard, and dashboards don’t chase anyone.
Intent isn’t a starting point
When I asked how many firms in the room consider client experience to be a strategic focus, nearly every hand went up. The intent is there. What’s missing is a starting point and an owner.
Firms spent a decade taking friction out of the work inside the firm and got good at it. Almost nothing has been done to take friction out of what it feels like to be the client. Client experience is something you design. It doesn’t happen by accident.
Chad Thomas is Group Product Manager – Experience at Aiwyn. His session, The Human Edge: Designing Client Experiences That Drive Growth, was presented at the 2026 Boomer Circle Summit.
