The satisfied client who doesn't know what's missing

Posted on: 5 February 2026

A satisfied client and a well-served client are two different things. In the professions where bad advice carries irreversible consequences, lawyers, strategy consultants, negotiators, financial advisors on complex transactions, they are often the opposite. The glowing referral, the five-star review, the enthusiastic recommendation to a colleague at the club: none of these measure the excellence of the professional. They measure the client's comfort during the process. And client comfort is a function of expectations, not of the objective quality of what was delivered. Those with low expectations will be delighted by mediocre work. Those who don't know what they're missing can't complain about not having had it.

Economists Darby and Karni gave this category of services a name in 1973: they called them "credence goods." These are products and services whose quality the client cannot evaluate even after receiving them, because they lack the technical competence to do so. When a mechanic tells you the wheel bearing needs replacing, you have no way of knowing whether it was truly necessary. The same applies, with enormously greater consequences, when a solicitor sets the strategy for litigation that will determine your company's future, when a strategy consultant recommends entering a new market, when a negotiator closes a deal that binds your organisation for the next decade. In every one of these cases you are buying someone's judgement, and you have no real means of assessing whether that judgement was the best available or simply the most convenient for the person selling it to you.

This mechanism produces a structural distortion that systematically favours mediocrity. The mediocre professional holds a formidable short-term competitive advantage: they tell the client what they want to hear, simplify where they shouldn't, avoid the difficult conversations, close quickly. The client leaves the meeting reassured, writes a glowing review on Chambers or Trustpilot, tells their board they've found "a brilliant solicitor" or "an outstanding consultant." The cycle feeds itself. But what the client doesn't know, and cannot know, is how much they left on the table. They will never learn which alternative strategy would have produced a better outcome, which contractual clause left unnegotiated will cost them dearly in three years, which unexplored scenario would have changed the entire result.

The excellent professional does precisely the opposite: complicates where necessary, asks the uncomfortable questions, presents the scenarios the client would rather ignore. The barrister who tells you "we can win this, but the risk of losing is real and the consequences would be these" doesn't make you happy. The strategy consultant who dismantles your intuition and forces you to rethink your approach doesn't make you feel validated. The negotiator who slows the process because they've identified a critical point requiring deeper analysis doesn't seem efficient. But this is exactly the work that protects your real interests. And the deeper truth is that the better the professional, the less immediately satisfied the client tends to be with the process, because the quality of the advice and the comfort of the person receiving it frequently travel in opposite directions.

Then there is the matter of the invisible architecture of the work itself. When a solicitor prepares a case to the highest standard, ninety per cent of the effort never surfaces. The client sees the hearing, the negotiation, the final document. They don't see the seventy hours of legal research, the alternative scenarios weighed and discarded one by one, the strategies tested mentally before selecting one, the traps identified and navigated before the client ever knew they existed. The strategy consultant who arrives at an apparently simple recommendation, three crisp words on a slide, reached it through a process of elimination the client cannot perceive. And the negotiator who secures excellent terms does so because they mapped the territory before sitting down at the table, studied the counterparty, prepared calibrated concessions and invisible red lines. Not because they are "good at dealmaking," as people say with that casualness which confuses performative talent with genuine competence.

This creates a compounding effect: the more prepared the professional, the easier the result appears, and the less the client appreciates the work behind it. It is the iceberg principle applied to professional practice. The client sees the tip, the ten per cent above the waterline, and judges on that basis. The ninety per cent below, which is precisely what separates a good result from an excellent one, remains invisible. Not because the professional conceals it, but because of the very nature of complex intellectual work: preparation has no visible form.

Economist George Akerlof, in his landmark 1970 study of the used car market, described a mechanism that applies with surgical precision here. When the buyer cannot distinguish quality, high-quality products are progressively driven from the market, because those offering them cannot command an adequate price. In high-stakes professional services the mechanism is identical: if the client cannot tell the difference between the consultant who invested two hundred hours on their matter and the one who spent twenty, if the distinction is imperceptible at the point of delivery and only reveals itself in long-term consequences, then the professional who invests more in preparation is not rewarded by the market. They are penalised, because their costs are higher, their timelines longer, their answers less reassuring.

Professional bodies understand this well. Every sector has its gold standards, its best practices that the finest practitioners recognise as the minimum threshold of excellence: due diligence protocols in financial advisory, case preparation standards at the Bar, analytical methodologies in strategy consulting. These standards exist because generations of professionals have learned, often through costly failures, that certain steps cannot be skipped if you want a genuinely robust outcome. But the client doesn't know them, doesn't understand them, and above all doesn't ask for them. To the client they are "too much," time and cost that feel unnecessary. And so, entirely rationally from their perspective, they seek the minimum they can get. They look for the professional who costs less, responds faster, tells them what they want to hear. And that professional will receive a better review than the colleague who did the work impeccably.

The point is not that the client is wrong. The point is that the incentive structure is fundamentally misaligned. Immediate satisfaction, the only metric accessible to the client, measures the experience of the service, not the quality of the service. The GP who says "nothing to worry about, you're fine" is more pleasant than the one who orders thorough tests to rule out a rare condition. The first will leave you more satisfied in the short term. The second might save your life. But the positive review goes to the first.

This is why the referral, the social proof, the enthusiastic word of mouth are not necessarily indicators of excellent work. They are indicators of a client who felt good during the process. And feeling good during the process is one thing; having been served with excellence is another. The distinction matters for anyone choosing a professional for a decision with significant consequences, and it matters equally for the professional who must decide whether to calibrate their work to perceived satisfaction or to actual excellence.

The true measure of professional quality is not the client's smile as they leave, but the architecture of the process you brought to bear. The preparation of the case, the rigour of the analysis, the scenarios explored and those discarded, the depth with which you understood the problem before proposing solutions, the courage to say "I wouldn't do this" when it would have been easier and more profitable to say yes. These are the things that distinguish the excellent professional from the mediocre one. And they are also, by a cruel structural irony, the things the client will never see.

Those who work this way do not pursue client satisfaction as their primary objective. They pursue client satisfaction as the natural consequence of work done to standards the client never imagined were possible. The difference is subtle but fundamental: it is not the satisfied client who gives the professional their value. It is the way you satisfy them, and more still the way you exceed their expectations on dimensions they didn't even know existed, that defines who you truly are in your craft.