The Beaton Benchmarks survey measures the attributes of your firm’s service and performance that matter most to clients. Our measurement model is built around 16 attributes – asking clients about things like how responsive you are, whether they understand your business, and how easy you are to deal with. We use the client ratings on these important attributes to determine how your firm is performing overall, compared to other similar firms.
Defining the Beaton Benchmarks attributes
Understanding what each attribute means in our survey is a crucial step to understanding your benchmarking results.
All 16 definitions of the Beaton Benchmarks are available with explanatory text and videos to download. To download the full document, click on the button below.
The 16 Beaton Benchmarks attributes
Here are the 16 attributes we measure:
- Access to partners / principals / directors
- Caring about their clients
- Commerciality of advice
- Communicate effectively
- Cost consciousness
- Ease of doing business with
- Expertise in your area of need
- Friendly
- Innovation
- Perception of fees
- Quality documentation
- Reliability
- Reputable
- Responsiveness
- Technical expertise
- Understanding your business
How and why we use these attributes
We track how these 16 areas affect three big things clients care about: how likely they are to recommend the firm, how they rate the firm’s overall performance, and whether they feel they’re getting good value. Together, these three areas make up a single score called overall client service – our main way of benchmarking how a firm is performing.
To figure out which of the 16 attributes matter most, we run a regression analysis (that is, we look at the data to see which areas drive the strongest client satisfaction). This helps firms know where to focus their efforts to build better client relationships and improve their performance.
Beaton undertook a thorough, multi-step process to fine-tune and confirm these definitions:
1. Gather client input:
We surveyed more than 1,000 clients and asked each one to describe one of the attributes in their own words. This made sure the definitions were based on real client views – not just our internal ideas or assumptions. We didn’t include “perception of fees” in this step, because its meaning is already clear and built into the survey question.
2. Use AI to find common themes:
We then used AI to analyse the responses and find patterns in how clients described each attribute. The AI grouped similar ideas together and created one clear definition for each attribute. This helped ensure the definitions captured a wide range of client views while still being consistent.
3. Check real client feedback:
To make sure the definitions matched real-world experiences, we used AI to review over 10,000 open-ended client comments about professional services firms. The AI picked out examples where firms did well (like “the firm demonstrated excellent responsiveness”) or poorly (like “communication was unclear and slow”) on each attribute. These examples added real context and confirmed the definitions made sense in practice.
Throughout this process, the Beaton research team closely reviewed all AI outputs to make sure everything was accurate and reliable. For more on how Beaton uses AI responsibly, see our AI policy.
Conclusion
These explanations should be seen as a high-level summary of what the attributes in the Beaton Benchmarks mean to the majority of respondents. It should complement, not supplement, knowing your clients and tailoring your service to their individual expectations.
See how clients view your firm and where you stand against competitors
Participate for free in the largest, most comprehensive client sentiment industry benchmarking study in professional services.
