Building Better Client Trust Within Your Accounting Practice

Traditionally, clients have tended to view their accountants in a purely output-based sense. They see CPAs as compliance, audit, and tax professionals who produce monthly or quarterly deliverables that are submitted to various bodies and departments and keep the cogs turning.?

However, in recent years, this perception has started to change and it’s a growth opportunity for accountants and the accounting landscape in general. Ongoing economic turbulence in recent years has left business owners uncertain about the future and how it may affect their organizations. Clients are increasingly turning to the people who know their business metrics better than anyone for insight and advice - their accountants.?

This represents an opportunity, as a CPA, to do more and offer your clients more - beyond traditional accounting services. By using your in-depth knowledge of their business performance coupled with access to vital data, you can partner with your clients to offer them advisory services and help their organizations scale and grow, all of which brings in more revenue to your practice.?

I’ve talked before about the benefits of launching a client advisory practice but, the truth is, you can’t simply jump from offering accounting services to being a trusted, reputable advisor. You first need to set the foundation to build these services on, and that foundation is trust.?

Building and strengthening clients’ trust in your abilities to guide their business doesn't happen overnight. Trust is something that can only be nurtured over time and is something that CPAs continuously need to work at.?

Why Trust is The Building Block to Expanding Your Practice

Trust underlies everything that you do as a service. Your clients trust your judgment and abilities when it comes to managing their compliance and tax requirements, if they didn’t they wouldn’t have hired you. However, this trust extends as far as what they know you’re capable of doing.?

Beyond that, their trust needs to be built and nurtured. They need to be made aware of what you can do beyond their initial scope of understanding and once that understanding is there, they need reassurance and reinforcement that you can, indeed, deliver on your word.?

In David Maister,? Robert Galford, and Charles Green’s book titled “The Trusted Advisor”, we find the concept of the trust equation that breaks down what trust consists of. Essentially, trust is made up of a combination of credibility, reliability, and intimacy over self-interest.?

While we, of course, can’t quantify these abstract concepts, it’s a solid foundation for how to approach building better trust between you and your clients. Let’s take a closer look at these points below.

Credibility refers to the plausibility of what you communicate and share. You develop credibility from knowledge gained through training, qualifying, and gaining experience in (at least in this case) accounting services. Because you’re qualified to practice, clients already view you as proficient and, therefore, credible.

Reliability relates to our actions. It goes beyond what’s said to what’s actually done. Telling your clients that you’re going to do something and following through with it is what creates reliability. The more consistently you act on your word by showing up or delivering on something, the more clients view you as being reliable.?

Intimacy, in this case, is tied to the feeling of safety and security clients have in their working relationship with you as their CPA. Keeping client confidentiality, leveraging advice that goes above and beyond what’s required of you, and lending an ear to listen to client concerns all contribute to developing intimacy, a key component of trust. It’s also the component CPAs generally have the hardest time developing because it’s far more person-centric and requires accountants and clients to open up and discuss things that sometimes go beyond numbers.?

Together, credibility, reliability, and intimacy all help to build trust. But these three factors can be undermined by a fourth: self-interest.

Self-interest relates to a person’s motives. Of course, anyone offering any kind of professional service is automatically operating with a certain level of self-interest, whether it’s turning a profit, expanding operations, etc. The goal here isn’t to pretend like you don’t have any self-interest when offering services, it’s to reduce it and make it clear to clients that you’re focused on their needs and success first.?

Looking at these parameters, it might seem like you do a lot (if not all) of these things already in your services. But this is not about building trust from the ground up, it already exists - or it should, at least. If it doesn’t, you need to start there first. This is about expanding that trust so it extends beyond what you already do as a CPA to cover what you can do.?

Building Better Trust Between You and Your Clients

Taking the trust equation parameters into account, focus on how you can take these trust-forming factors further to increase client confidence in you.?

To take your credibility further, consider specializing in a specific niche you’d like to advise. Getting involved in and learning about an industry niche will help build your authority and make you the ideal candidate for leveraging advice to clients who operate within it.

You can improve your reliability in your client's eyes by going further than what they expect of you. Don’t just hand your clients what they’re looking for, give them what they’re not looking for. Offer them critical information and data points that can provide insights they didn’t have before. Be proactive at the same time and bring them solutions and recommendations based on them.?

Going beyond the technical aspects of your job and improving rapport within your working relationship with clients often gets pushed to the bottom of any CPA’s to-do list, but don’t overlook it.?

Ask your clients the bigger questions about their goals, challenges, concerns, and aspirations. Build your relationship beyond numbers and data. Having a full understanding of everything your client is dealing with and might be informing their decisions will help you leverage better advice in the long run.?

Lastly, minimize the perception of self-interest by doing these things regardless of whether clients choose to pursue advisory services with you or not. Going the extra mile to further develop a client’s trust in you shows your dedication and commitment. It creates a bridge of opportunity that clients may choose to cross now or at a later stage. Even if they don’t opt for advisory services, their trust in you as their CPA will be strengthened.?

Remember, trust in itself is invaluable. It’s an ongoing, but ultimately worthwhile investment that will become the building block on which you build your advisory services. Even if you don’t want to venture into the advisory sector, actively working to improve clients’ trust in you will still benefit both your business and theirs.