8 strategies to build trust with your accounting firm’s clients

Whether you’re investing with a financial advisor, choosing a family doctor, or confiding in a close friend, trust is the invisible thread that connects us and all of life’s decisions. Trust is the basis for everything we do as not only consumers—but as people.

And it’s one of the most essential values of an accounting firm.

In fact, in a study of 350 small business owners, trust was the number one reason why they chose their accountant, ahead of referrals, specialization, and competitive pricing.

Trust isn’t just part of your service; in many ways, it is the service.

93% of business executives agree that building and maintaining trust improves the bottom line. It directly improves customer loyalty and retention, opens up new business opportunities, and positively increases your reputation.

Not to mention the 31% of small business owners who say their accountant is the advisor they trust the most, behind their family and friends.

This article explores strategies for building and maintaining a high level of trust that leads to mutually-beneficial, long-term relationships between you and your clients, including:

• How to lead with transparency and accountability

• Tips for offering value and building a credible personal brand

• How the right accounting technology bolsters client trust

8 strategies for building client trust

Discover how to build trust with your client base, including potential clients.

1. Value authenticity, logic, and empathy

Trust has three key drivers: authenticity, logic, and empathy.

Authenticity, empathy and logic are key pillars in establishing client trust

• Authenticity involves being genuine and transparent in every client interaction—especially when you make mistakes.

• Empathy is deeply understanding the problems your clients are facing and making a concerted effort to resolve them.

• Logic is demonstrating your credibility as a financial professional, giving your clients the assurance that you’re equipped to handle the work.

When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three areas. Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss from The Harvard Business Review recommend you identify “trust wobble”, the driver that is most likely to fail you at the current stage of your business.

“To identify your wobble, think of a recent moment when you were not trusted as much as you wanted to be,” they encourage.

Ask yourself:

1. Did your client feel you were misrepresenting some part of yourself or your story? If so, that’s an authenticity problem.

2. Did your client feel you might be putting your own interests first? If so, that’s an empathy problem.

3. Did your client question the rigor of your analysis or your ability to execute an ambitious plan? If so, that’s a logic problem.

As you try to bolster client trust, think situationally and identify moments for improvement. People trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they believe that you care about them (empathy), and when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic).

Clients feel that empathy in specific, human moments. 

Asked what their accountant offers that AI could never replicate as part of The Future of Client Trust in the Age of AI study, and people did not name a technical aspect. Their answers clustered into six themes: the relationship itself, emotional support, deep knowledge of their history, judgment, accountability, and proactive care. 

One small business owner captured the empathy driver exactly: “My accountant can sense my anxiety and needs from my tone of voice.”

2. Provide value

Providing real, measurable value to your clients is a form of gifting.

After every interaction, your client should walk away feeling that they gained something, whether that be a clearer understanding of their financial landscape, practical solutions to specific challenges, useful content or resources, or simply peace of mind knowing that their affairs are in capable hands.

In the age of AI, this value is transforming like never before. 81% of small business owners say their accountant is more valuable if they use AI to automate 90% of the routine work and then use the time savings to fund a monthly strategy call.

AI is creating the capacity for you to give your clients more value.

3. Be organized and communicative

Trust naturally builds when firms manage projects efficiently and keep clients informed about the progress of work.

If your firm is disorganized, you’re already on the back foot. Here are some practical things you can do to increase organization:

1. Declutter your tech stack. Selecting the right technology for your practice centralizes your work in one place and prevents you and your clients from bouncing between different apps.

2. Centralize documentation. Document management tools can help you effortlessly access client information and give them easy access too.

3. Streamline your workflow. Standardize routine tasks, like client onboarding and monthly accounting, with automated accounting templates to create a predictable, reliable workflow for you and your clients.

4. Leverage AI. Your AI accounting software should make it easy to share reports, request documents, and communicate with clients.

4. Hit deadlines

There’s no quicker way to lose a client’s trust than to consistently miss deadlines.

“Building trust with clients requires honesty right from the first meeting,” says Michael Girolametto, Partner at Modern Controller, “Pretending you can provide a service that isn’t in your arsenal of expertise is a great way to create operational inefficiencies, and ruin your firm's chances of future referrals. The same goes for the promise of unrealistic deadlines.”

When you first sit down with a client, give them reasonable timelines and don’t overpromise. Delivering timely work is crucial for retaining them as a client for the long haul and generating positive word of mouth for your referral strategy.

The tools you choose to power your firm with play a critical role in your firm’s ability to deliver on deadlines. At the core of your firm’s tech stack should be a robust accounting practice management tool that leverages project management and workflow automation to help keep things on track.

5. Communicate with clarity

In addition to being upfront about project deadlines, you need to be clear in your requests, questions, and concerns in every client engagement.

This starts and ends with empathy—one of those three major drivers of trust. Firms that train their staff to listen actively and respond empathetically are more likely to resolve issues satisfactorily.

Years ago, Jim Buffington from Intuit Accountants explained that when dealing with uncertainties, any type of communication is better than no communication at all: “The firms that communicated as much as they knew often and early had much better experiences with their clients during the pandemic,” he said.

That comment still rings true today, pandemic or not.

Recommended reading: How to improve your team’s communication for better client relationships

Today, clients are least satisfied with the proactive advice provided by their accountant, compared to other parts of the relationship like quality of deliverables, technical accuracy, and speed of response. Clients want more of their accountant’s judgment, more of their foresight, more of their voice in the room before the problem arrives. Not just when it does.

6. Be consistent

Clients need to know what to expect and when—with no surprises. It provides them with certainty, stability, and predictability.

This means that each interaction a client has with your firm needs to have some sort of continuous thread that links it with the interaction before and the interactions to come.

There's a good reason why people choose McDonald’s over independent eateries at malls and airports—there’s consistency in a Big Mac no matter where you are in the world. A Big Mac is a Big Mac. The McDonald’s experience is the McDonald’s experience. This consistency is one of the cornerstones of the business’ success.

For your clients, that means that no matter who they interact with at your firm, they should receive the same high level of service, with the same procedures and expectations.

They’re more likely to trust you when you can demonstrate consistency—as long as that consistency is positive.

7. Use client testimonials

There are few things more powerful than real social proof. Sharing client success stories with other existing or prospective clients will help demonstrate your track record.

There are three key elements to remember when sharing client success stories:

1. Be specific. Don’t beat around the bush. Be explicit in how you helped a client’s business and solved their pain points. And use metrics if you can. For example, “We helped ACME Corp. improve their forecast accuracy by 25%, helping them make smarter decisions in time for their busiest period of the year.”

2. Choose like-for-like. Telling your client who owns two dental clinics about how you improved the inventory management of your client who owns a bicycle shop is okay. But it’s not relevant. A more impactful client success story would be about how you helped another dental clinic with a financial plan to completely overhaul their aging equipment.

3. Show, don’t tell. Use actual quotes and testimonials from clients—and use video when you can. Hearing it directly from other clients holds more weight than from you. Here’s an example of a video testimonial from Missouri-based accounting firm, Compere Robinette CPAs (CRC), about how Karbon saves them time so they can focus on building client relationships.

Proof of tangible results helps clients picture a better reality for themselves and gives them trust that you have the ability to repeat similar success for them.

8. Build your personal brand

Another strategy you can use to establish trust is to invest in your personal brand.

Today, all professionals need a virtual presence.

Start with what comes naturally to you and follow your innate strengths and interests. If you’re a skilled writer, for example, play to your strengths by starting a blog or regularly posting on social media. If you have a knack for public speaking, sign up for events and look for opportunities to be featured in a podcast or thought leadership webinar.

As a business leader, you have the distinct advantage of using your personal brand to boost that of your firm.

There’s no better time to start than the present. Here are 10 ways to build your personal brand.

Building client trust in the age of AI

When it comes to AI, your clients expect you’re already using it in some way. But when it’s getting more and more difficult to decipher what is real, trust has become every company's differentiator.

So how do you build trust, specifically when it comes to AI in accounting?

1. Be transparent. 89% of clients want some openness about where, when and how you’re using AI with their work. Yet only 21% of accounting firms actually have an AI strategy or policy that would outline how that information is communicated to them. Developing your firm’s AI strategy is the first step to delivering consistent AI transparency to your clients.

2. Keep a human-in-the-loop. The closer a task sits to what keeps a client up at night, the more they want a person leading it. Automate the routine, and protect the moments that carry the relationship.

3. Reinvest the time saved. Clients don’t necessarily want AI’s efficiency handed back as a discount. They want it returned as attention. Used that way, AI doesn’t threaten trust, it funds it, by giving your people more time for the conversations only they can have.

Building accountant-client relationships: Technology and trust go hand-in-hand

These eight strategies sound great in theory, but executing them takes work. In a time where trust in brands have plummeted to an all-time low, earning and maintaining trust and loyalty over the long-term requires help from the right technology and systems.

Technology helps accountants build trust in three key areas: communication, clarity, and analytics.

Communication

How you communicate with clients is the biggest enhancer (or detractor) of trust. How you make customers feel has 1.5 times more impact than what you encourage them to think. And a better perception of your firm not only improves satisfaction but increases the likelihood they’ll refer your firm to others.

Technology helps you here.

Email management tools help you communicate early, often, and in the right places. Better yet, an accounting practice management tool with an email integration ensures that your client communications live within the context of your work. The best email integrations:

• Consolidate communication between staff and clients in automatic audit trails

• Enable staff to collaborate on emails via comments, out of the client’s view

• Allow emails to be assigned to the team member who is best for the job

• Send automatic client reminder emails

Ultimately, you’ll be able to know who last contacted a client, what was said, and when that was.

Clarity

From there, accounting tools can roll all communication into client portals that are unique to every client. It gives everyone involved clear visibility into what was decided in email threads, task assignments, and comments (both internal and external).

By eliminating information silos, increasing visibility, and democratizing client information across your firm, your practice management tool with an email integration will help provide clarity to your team and your clients, ultimately helping strengthen trust and relationships.

Analytics

Finally, technology gives you the data and insights you need to prevent looming issues before they have a chance to negatively impact your clients’ trust.

Take Tennick Accountants, for example.

Before using a data-based accounting tool, founder Graeme Tennick and his team were operating out of Excel spreadsheets and manual checklists that gave them little to no visibility into how they were performing. Client relationships suffered for it.

After switching to Karbon for better client management, the Tennick team now has comprehensive analytics dashboards that give them data-backed insights into every aspect of their client relationships and how they are performing.

“Data intensive firms look at the data in and around them and make better decisions to help clients avoid issues, predict issues, and make a better life for themselves. We’re in that category,” says Graeme.

Graeme Tennick explaining the role of the accountant as the trusted advisor

Build trust with Karbon and accounting practice excellence

Client trust will take your business further than any flashy marketing strategy, short-term growth solution, or aggressive sales tactic ever could.

And accounting practice excellence is fundamental to naturally building that trust.

See how Karbon can help revolutionize your client relationships: book a demo or start a free trial.