Why they’re not called the Oscars of Professional Services
We’re referring of course to the Financial Review Client Choice Awards. The reason our awards are not called the Oscars of Professional Services is that the Client Choice Awards are voted by clients, not peers, past winners or a panel of judges. We say that clients are the only voice that really counts.
The Oscars stand for excellence in the film industry. The Client Choice Awards stand for excellence in professional services. The Oscars are in their 91st year; the Client Choice Awards are in their 15th.
And there the comparison ends.
Today’s full-page finalist announcement in the Financial Review reveals there are 25 categories of award across the five verticals of Accounting & Consulting Services, Consulting Engineering & Built Environment, IP Specialist, Law & Related Services and Professional Services Startups.
Congratulations to the Finalists and, on behalf of your clients, thank you for your excellent service!
This year we are proud to partner with 9 inspiring sponsors and a record 16 supporting professional associations.
The 2019 Awards by the numbers
143 entries
15,359 client ratings
350+ expected attendees at the gala dinner
What's new?
This year we have three new developments in the Awards:
1. Two ground-breaking new categories:
Built Environment. For the first time with our new client survey technology we were able to provide Architectural, smaller Consulting Engineering, Environmental Services, Planning and Project Management firms with the opportunity of entering the Awards.
We are delighted with the number and enthusiasm of the Built Environment firms that entered this year and thank Consult Australia for sponsoring and 7 other supporting professional associations that made it possible to reach the many 1,000s of these firms in New Zealand and Australia.
Professional Services Startup of the Year. This award has been introduced to celebrate the socio-economic benefits to clients, ingenuity and excellence in the exploding applications of technology in professional services. The startups are delivering professional or quasi-professional services and represent varying combinations of tech and business model innovation.
Of necessity – but still true to our ‘voice of clients’ mission – the Professional Services Startup Award is different in the way the Award is adjudicated. C-suite leaders of professional services firms in Australia and New Zealand have voted on the short-listed entries to name the 5 Finalists announced today. The winner will be chosen on the basis of the most votes received and a review by senior representatives of IP Australia, the Digital Innovation Festival and beaton as a sense-check.
2. All categories are being judged on a combined country basis. This means if a firm has operations in Australia and New Zealand, the size band into which it falls is based on its combined annual revenue in the two countries.
3. Annual revenue bands in Accounting & Consulting Services, Consulting Engineering and Law & Related Services the revenue categorisation has been standardised into three: <A$50M, A$50-200M and >A$200M. There are no revenue bands in IP Specialists, Built Environment and Professional Services Startups.
Only positive impact on beatonbenchmarks
Readers know that apart from celebrating excellence in professional Services, the Client Choice Awards are the data-capture mechanism that enables beaton to produce world-class reports on individual professional services firms. We report on firm’s client satisfaction, client experience (CX) and brand health, and we benchmark their results against close competitors and track trends in the key industry and firm-specific metrics.
Rest assured, the developments in the 2019 Client Choice Awards announced in this post will have only a positive impact on beatonbenchmarks reports and deep-dive analyses.