Here's an exercise I sometimes suggest to managing partners. Open your firm's client portal on your phone. Not your laptop - your phone. Try to do something simple: find a recent invoice, check the status of a matter, download a document you were sent last week.
Now open your banking app. Check your balance, find a transaction from Tuesday, share the details with someone.
That feeling - the slight irritation when your own firm's portal loads slowly, asks you to pinch-zoom, or requires you to remember a password you set in 2019 - that's not you being unreasonable. That's exactly what your clients experience every time they interact with your firm digitally.
And the bit that should really bother you: your clients aren't comparing your portal to the other firms in your sector. They're comparing it to Monzo.
We've benchmarked ourselves against our competitors and we're about the same. Some are slightly better in certain areas, some slightly worse. We're fine.
I hear this constantly. And the frustrating thing is, it's usually accurate. You probably are about the same as your sector peers. The problem is that your sector peers aren't the benchmark your clients are using.
There's a phenomenon that researchers have been documenting for years - McKinsey, Salesforce, and Forrester have all written about it in B2B contexts - called expectation transfer. When someone has a brilliant digital experience in one part of their life, that experience becomes the new baseline for everything else. Not consciously. Nobody sits there thinking "my law firm's portal should work like Deliveroo." But when they tap an app and get instant confirmation, real-time tracking, and a frictionless interface twelve times a day, and then log into your portal and wait for a PDF to load... they feel it. The gap registers even if they can't articulate where the expectation came from.
Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer research found that 73% of B2B buyers say the experience a company provides matters as much as its products or services. But only 49% say companies generally provide good experiences. That's a 24-percentage-point gap between what clients expect and what they're getting. And the expectation side of that equation isn't being set by your competitors. It's being set by the consumer technology those clients use every single day.
I was having dinner with the COO of a mid-sized accountancy firm a few months back. Smart bloke, runs a tight ship. He pulled out his phone to show me something on their client portal and spent about forty seconds trying to find the login page. Forty seconds. On his own firm's platform. He laughed it off, said something like "God, we really need to sort this out." I asked him, half-joking, whether he thought they actually would. He went quiet for a second. "Probably not this year," he said. And that was that.
"Consumer digital experiences" is too vague to be useful. There are specific products that have done the most damage - if you want to call it that - to professional services firms' digital standing. Not because they're particularly cutting-edge, but because they've made certain interactions so effortless that anything less now feels broken.
Mobile banking is the obvious one. Monzo, Starling, Revolut - they've completely reset what people expect from financial information. Real-time visibility. Instant notifications. The ability to search and share transaction data in seconds. If you're a corporate finance adviser sending a monthly PDF statement by email - and I know many of you are - you're being compared to an app that updates in real time and lets clients slice their data however they want. The PDF doesn't just feel old-fashioned. It feels actively hostile to the way people now expect to interact with financial information.
Then there are collaboration tools. Slack, Teams, Notion - these have made asynchronous communication, shared document access, and project visibility completely normal. Your client's internal teams are running complex projects with full transparency, threaded conversations, and searchable archives. Then they engage your firm and the communication channel is... email. Long chains with attachments that get lost, version control that doesn't exist, no shared view of where things stand. I've written separately about the 11-tab problem - the chaos that happens when clients have to juggle multiple disconnected systems just to work with their service providers. Collaboration tools are a big part of why that chaos now feels so jarring.
Delivery apps might seem like a stretch, but they shouldn't. Deliveroo and Amazon haven't just changed how we order food and buy things. They've normalised real-time status tracking for everything. Your client can track a £15 takeaway from kitchen to front door with minute-by-minute updates. But they can't see where their legal matter stands without emailing their relationship partner and waiting a day for a response. That comparison is happening whether you like it or not.
One caveat worth making: the specific apps that set the bar depend on who your clients actually are. A 60-year-old family business owner's baseline might be set by their banking app and Amazon. A 35-year-old CFO at a tech company is probably benchmarking you against every SaaS product they use daily. The principle holds universally; the reference points vary. Worth thinking about who your clients actually are and what they use, rather than assuming.
Speed is the one that surprises people most. The response time that felt perfectly acceptable in 2015 feels glacial in 2025. When every consumer service your client uses provides instant confirmation, waiting 24 hours for an acknowledgement from your firm doesn't just feel slow - it feels like you don't care. I know that's unfair. I know your team is busy doing actual substantive work. But the client doesn't see the work. They see the silence. And silence, in a world of instant feedback, gets interpreted as indifference.
A partner at a consulting firm told me recently that a client had actually asked whether their email had been received, three hours after sending it. Three hours. That would have been laughable five years ago. It's the new normal.
Clarity is the next one. Consumer digital products are designed to be understood without instruction. You download Monzo, open it, and you know what to do. No training session, no user guide, no phone call to explain the interface. Now compare that to the average professional services client portal, where half the time even the firm's own staff need a walkthrough. If your digital environment requires explanation, that's not a complexity problem. That's a design problem. And your clients know it, because nothing else in their digital life requires a manual.
Then there's self-service for routine stuff. Submitting a document, requesting a status update, accessing a previous report, downloading an invoice. In every consumer context your client encounters, they can do these things themselves, instantly, without talking to anyone. When your firm requires them to email their account manager and wait for someone to dig out a document and send it back, that's friction. Accumulated over dozens of small interactions, that friction is what eventually makes a client start looking at alternatives.
And mobile experience. I still encounter professional services firms whose portals are essentially unusable on a phone. Not broken, exactly - they load. But they're clearly designed for a desktop and merely tolerated on mobile. Meanwhile, your clients are doing their banking, managing their teams, and running their diaries from their phone. Every time a client tries to check something on your portal from a taxi or between meetings and gives up because the text is tiny and the buttons are too close together - that's a small deposit into the "maybe we should look at other firms" account.
This brings us back to that managing partner who benchmarked against sector peers and concluded everything was fine. And look - that benchmarking isn't worthless. It's useful to know where you sit relative to your direct competitors. If everyone in your sector has a poor digital experience, there's a certain safety in numbers.
But that safety is eroding. Fast.
Your clients aren't grading you on a curve against other professional services firms. They're grading you against their lived experience of digital interaction across every context. A firm sitting at the 80th percentile of its sector might still be creating real frustration relative to the cross-sector baseline that every client carries around in their pocket.
But our clients have never complained about the website. Or the portal. Or the onboarding process.
Right. They haven't complained. They've quietly factored it into their overall impression of your firm. The research on this is pretty clear: most clients don't articulate digital friction as a specific complaint. They express it as a vague sense that the firm "feels a bit dated" or "isn't as sharp as they used to be." It shows up in satisfaction scores that drift downward by a point or two each year. It shows up in the pitch you didn't win, where the feedback was "the other firm just felt more modern." It shows up in the renewal conversation that used to be a formality and now involves a procurement process.
Gartner found that improving buyer experience can increase revenue by up to 20%. Forrester reports that CX leaders outperform laggards by nearly 80% in customer retention. These aren't consumer-only findings. They apply to B2B services too - maybe especially to B2B services, where the switching cost is high enough that clients tolerate mediocre experiences for years before they finally move. And when they do move, they move completely.
The danger with this kind of argument is that it leaves you feeling overwhelmed. "Great, so I'm being compared to Monzo and I'm losing. What am I supposed to do, build a fintech app?"
No. God, no.
The response here isn't to try to replicate what consumer tech companies have built. You don't have their budgets, their engineering teams, or their user base. And you don't need them. Because the things that make Monzo feel good to use aren't proprietary technology secrets. They're design principles that apply to any digital experience, in any sector, at any budget level.
Speed is the simplest. Fast is always better than slow. This doesn't mean you need real-time everything - it means your pages need to load quickly, your confirmations need to be instant, and your responses need to happen within minutes rather than hours. A client who submits a document and gets an immediate "received, thank you" feels looked after. A client who submits a document into silence does not. That's not a technology investment. It's a design decision backed by a bit of automation.
Clarity is next. Your portal shouldn't need a user guide. Your service pages shouldn't require a phone call to interpret. Your invoices shouldn't be PDFs full of codes that only make sense to your finance team. Every client-facing digital interaction should be understandable on first contact, without training, without explanation. If it's not, the design wasn't tested with the user in mind.
And then friction. Every step you remove from a process is a gift to your client. Count the steps in your onboarding process. Count the clicks to find an invoice. Count the emails required to get a status update. Then ask: which of these can I remove? Every form field you eliminate, every time you let someone do something themselves instead of routing it through a human intermediary - that adds up.
These aren't moonshot investments. A two-sprint project to rebuild your enquiry-to-onboarding flow. A focused effort to make your portal actually work on mobile. An afternoon spent simplifying your most-used client-facing forms. We worked with one professional services firm that saw a 22% improvement in enquiry-to-client conversion within 90 days, just by fixing the handoff between the website and the onboarding process. Not a full redesign. Not a new platform. Just removing friction from the journey that mattered most.
Most professional services firms are benchmarking against each other - and most of them are reaching the same comfortable conclusion that they're "about the same." Which means the bar for standing out is surprisingly low. You don't need to be Monzo. You just need to be noticeably better than the sector norm on speed, clarity, and friction. And the sector norm, in most professional services verticals, is not high.
The firm that gets this right doesn't just avoid losing clients to the comparison. It starts winning them. When a prospect has been dealing with slow, confusing, friction-heavy digital experiences from every other firm in your sector, and then they encounter yours and it just... works? That's memorable. That's the thing they mention in the partner meeting when they're deciding who to appoint.
The comparison is happening whether you know about it or not. Your clients are measuring you against the best digital experience they've had anywhere. The only question is whether you're going to do something about it - or keep benchmarking against firms that are just as behind as you are.