Satisfied and Leaving

Every MSP board deck has a satisfaction slide. Client health is green, the NPS sits in the sixties, and the account team has three warm quotes from the last round of business reviews. The slide is usually true. Two surveys published this year show why it is also a poor guide to the one thing a board wants it to predict: who stays.

Two surveys, one contradiction

In May the research firm Censuswide surveyed 600 IT and security leaders for Corsica Technologies, an MSP asking how clients feel about providers like itself. Every respondent worked at a US company with 200 to 1,000 employees that already relies on an MSP. The goodwill came back about as high as a survey can measure: 95.8 percent trust their provider to act in their best interest, and 87 percent are satisfied with the strategic guidance they get.

The same 600 people then answered a question about next year. 65 percent are considering switching MSPs in the next 12 months.

WatchGuard asked a bigger room in April: 842 IT and security decision makers across 20 countries, at companies with 2 to 2,499 employees. 58 percent plan to switch security providers within the next three years. The verb in the survey is plan, a firmer word than consider.

Different clocks

A book of business holds both numbers at once because they run on different clocks. Satisfaction scores the last ninety days of tickets. Switching intent prices the next contract. A client can think the help desk is excellent and still believe the market holds something better, the way a tenant can like the apartment and still browse listings every night.

And in this market, the listings come to them. Kaseya’s 2026 State of the MSP report asked 1,061 MSPs where their new clients come from. About a third said mostly competitive takeaways. Nearly half said a mix of takeaways and first-time buyers. Poaching is the industry’s main growth motion, which means every renewal book doubles as a competitor’s pipeline.

Barracuda measured the floor under all of this in 2025. Of 2,000 security decision makers surveyed by Vanson Bourne, 2 percent could not imagine switching to another MSP. The other 98 percent could. And 45 percent named a condition the provider controls: they will switch if they cannot see evidence of security skills and round-the-clock support. The burden of proof sits with the incumbent, every year, whether or not anyone says so at the review.

What satisfied actually measures

The Corsica survey caught the mechanism in one pairing. 87 percent of clients call themselves satisfied with the strategic guidance they get. Asked why they are considering a switch anyway, three in ten named lack of strategic guidance. The same room rates the guidance fine and shops for better guidance. In a services relationship, satisfied mostly means no open wounds. The client keeps comparing all the same.

The exit, when it comes, is bigger than the service line that caused it. Barracuda looked at clients leaving a provider after a security failure who also buy bundled IT services from the same firm. 89 percent take the IT work with them, 46 percent at the same moment and 42 percent later. Accounts on the way out leave whole.

The number nobody publishes

Here is the part that should hold an owner’s attention. The number that would price all this, actual churn set against stated intent, is published nowhere in this industry. GTIA’s 2025 channel report does not publish client retention. Kaseya’s and Datto’s benchmark reports track dozens of operating metrics; neither publishes a churn rate. Service Leadership keeps its client-level benchmarks inside a paid product. There is no study connecting satisfaction scores to renewal outcomes for MSPs, and no benchmark for how long contracts even run. The satisfaction slide survives in board decks for a simple reason: it is the only number anyone collects.

Stated intent is soft, and an honest reading says so. Some of the 58 percent will grumble and renew. Switching is work, and inertia is real. But no dataset can tell you how much of the intent converts, because nobody measures the conversion. A renewal forecast built on satisfaction scores prices that risk at zero, and zero is a hope.

What to ask at the next review

The fix is a different set of questions at the next operating review. Ask for churn as a number: logos and revenue lost over the trailing 24 months, printed on the same page as the satisfaction score, every quarter. Ask for the renewal book laid out by contract end date, with each account marked for the triggers clients themselves report: a security incident in the past year, a price increase in flight, service that has gone reactive. Ask what share of the company’s own new logos were won off a competitor’s book, then assume competitors run the same arithmetic against yours.

Client satisfaction is still worth earning. The slide is the problem. It reports how clients felt about last quarter while a majority of the buyers surveyed this year plan, on their own telling, to spend a future year somewhere else, and nothing else in the deck would catch them deciding. Treat renewals as deals to be re-won, priced and worked like the pipeline. The competitor calling your best account already does.