What is a Useful Business Outcome?

The purpose of enabling a business outcome for customers is to increase our retention and our expansion revenue. It’s great for the customer, and it also needs to be great for us. But I see almost anything resulting from an action we take described as a business outcome. Which gets confusing. And trivialises the term ‘business outcome’.

I’d like to offer some thoughts and a possible definition of ‘business outcome’.

First – an outcome creates a new to-be state or end-state. For example, if you eat a hamburger, your end-state changes from hungry to full.

Second – in business, to be truly useful, an outcome must be ongoing. A one-off benefit doesn’t help the customer next year. So, it doesn’t help us with retention and expansion next year.

Third – the end-state must be something higher management in the customer would recognise as a success. It should result in our customer-champion being seen as a hero or heroine. If higher management might say “I don’t care.”, it’s not a great business outcome.

So, a definition of a useful business outcome: ‘An ongoing business result higher management of a customer regards as a success.’

What do you think?

#CS #outcomeleaders #outcomes #customercentric #CSM #incomefromoutcomes