The Outcome Economy: Customer Outcomes In Practice
- Stuart Medhurst
- Feb 9
- 5 min read
Customer Outcomes: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Customer outcomes are tricky to manage because every person has different expectations and measures of success, which can make outcomes feel intangible and hard to pin down. That is not an excuse to ignore them.
Some brands show what “good” looks like. Lexus, for example, consistently delivers outstanding customer experience, from dealership visits to long‑term ownership. Toyota as a manufacturer reinforces that with reliable, enjoyable cars; one of the best ownership experiences I have had was with a Toyota Supra, superb to drive, highly dependable and supported by excellent service.
Why Many Technology Companies Still Struggle With Customer Outcomes
When you look at rankings of outstanding companies – such as Forbes lists – technology vendors are often under‑represented. Apple is a notable exception. Their products are designed for clear use cases, especially for people who are not “techies” but want technology that just works to deliver an outcome.
Apple’s support reinforces that design. In one case, an Apple technician stayed on the phone with my daughter for hours until they fully resolved her issue and delivered a positive outcome. Experiences like that are why my family tends to favour Apple.
There are downsides too. Apple’s historical resistance to the right‑to‑repair movement and its tightly controlled repair ecosystem have frustrated customers who value openness and longevity. Software updates that render older but still functioning hardware obsolete are another grey area. Even so, Apple remains a leading reference point in tech for outcome‑driven design and support.
Many other technology vendors are far more revenue‑driven, with customer experience as a secondary concern. At Oracle, for instance, a significant focus was on compliance audits, with large teams dedicated to checking usage and enforcing licensing. While there is a fair expectation that “if you use it, you should own it,” Oracle did not embrace the more flexible approaches to sub‑capacity and virtualisation that others adopted, which often put them at odds with customer expectations.
When Customer Outcomes Break Down Inside the Business
Sales vs Customer Success: The Outcome Ownership Gap
One reason customer outcomes suffer is organisational silos. Sales teams handle the deal, often building ROI or value‑engineering cases aimed at the CFO. Once the contract is signed, the responsibility for adoption and outcomes is handed to customer success.
Over-Promising and Mis-Selling: Where Outcomes Start to Fail
If there has been over promising or mis-selling, customer success is left to “fix” a deal that may never have been viable. Their remit is often limited and in extreme cases the situation moves from customer success to legal disputes and mis‑selling claims.
This disconnect means no one owns the full journey from promise to outcome. The customer experiences a fragmented lifecycle where commercial value is emphasised upfront but operational success is someone else’s problem once the ink is dry.
Lessons From The Automotive Industry: Real-World Examples of Good and Bad Customer Outcomes
The automotive sector offers a powerful lens on good, bad, and ugly customer outcomes and unfortunately has a large pool of cases to draw upon. Over the past decade, manufacturers have faced intense pressure to electrify and meet changing regulations, often with mixed results.
When Innovation Hurts Customer Outcomes
Porsche’s push into electric vehicles with the Taycan shows both ambition and risk. While technically impressive, the software underpinning these cars was often buggy, leading to “bricked” vehicles, recovery trips to the dealer and long periods off the road. For owners spending large sums, that is extremely frustrating.
This pain continues into the second‑hand market. High complexity, patchy reliability and limited repair capability at service centre depress used values and make buyers wary of taking on out‑of‑warranty risk. Cars that cost around £130,000 at list have, in some cases, dropped to below £35,000 on the used market 3 years later.
Monetisation vs Value: The Subscription Backlash
BMW’s experiment with paywalls for hardware features was another misstep. Customers who had already paid for physical components in their vehicles were then asked to subscribe to unlock functions like heated seats. Unsurprisingly, forums filled with complaints about paying twice for the same capability.
Dieselgate: When Customer Outcomes Become Reputation Damage
At the “ugly” end of the spectrum is the Volkswagen Audi Group’s Dieselgate scandal. Leadership initially blamed a few rogue engineers for software that cheated emissions tests but it is hard to imagine such a targeted solution emerging without broader business direction. The result was over 30 billion in costs and major reputational damage.
These examples show what happens when companies prioritise short‑term revenue, regulation workarounds or aggressive monetisation over honest, outcome‑driven value for customers.
Customer Outcomes vs Customer Requests: Why Innovation Still Matters
Focusing on customer outcomes does not mean simply doing whatever customers say. Henry Ford’s famous line, that if he had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses”, highlights the limits of customer led innovation in disruptive shifts.
Customers cannot always articulate solutions they have never seen. That is why many successful innovations start as “skunkworks” projects, operating outside standard corporate structures. McDonald’s breakfast and drive‑throughs, for example, began as local experiments to meet customers needs rather than central mandates.
In the 1990s, I worked for a company, Tivoli Systems, founded by ex‑IBM employees who had proposed an idea IBM rejected as “not our future.” They built it independently; years later, IBM bought the company back once the concept had proven itself. Some ideas will fail and that is fine – the key is creating space for experimentation that is close enough to customers to understand real problems, but free enough to explore new solutions.
How Organisations Can Improve Customer Outcomes
Managing customer outcomes well means balancing listening, challenge and anticipation. You start by understanding what success looks like for your customer today, their goals, constraints and current status quo. Then you challenge that status quo with thoughtful “why” questions, not to be difficult, but to open up better possibilities.
Often, the best outcomes are not what the customer initially expected but they feel heard, supported and guided with empathy. Many of my customers over the years have appreciated this consultative challenge because it changes how they see their own situation and reveals options they had not considered.
Challenge Customers With Insight and Expertise
You also need to keep an eye on outliers and weak signals in your customers’ industries: new regulations, emerging competitors, changing political priorities and early adopters. Politicians and policymakers change direction; new leaders bring new agendas. Betting your entire strategy on a single external opinion is risky but ignoring the environment is just as dangerous.
Bringing useful knowledge to customers about trends, risks and opportunities is part of delivering outcomes. If you constantly extract information and resources from them without adding insight, you become a liability rather than a partner.
Put simply: enjoy what you do, keep your customers front and centre and regularly challenge the status quo with empathy and expertise. That is how you navigate the good, the bad and the ugly of customer outcomes in a complex, changing world.
The Stratavus Outcome Economy Series
This is the last post in the five part series about the Outcome Economy. The series is a short introduction to all aspects of the Outcome Economy.
Customer Outcomes In Practice (this post)
The outcome economy is not a buzzword. It is a return to something very old: finding a need and fulfilling it, selling to humans who buy against outcomes and making technology the enabler rather than the hero.
Many leaders recognise these patterns but struggle to shift them in practice. If you’re exploring what an outcome-led approach could look like in your environment, we’re always open to a conversation.
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