The Outcome Economy: From A Customer Success Perspective
- Stuart Medhurst
- Feb 6
- 6 min read
How the Outcome Economy Is Redefining Customer Success
Customer success has come a long way from being “the complaints department.” In the outcome economy, it should be the function that ensures customers achieve the results they bought your product or service for in the first place.
Many companies still miss this point. They implement technology and processes mainly to save money, not to improve customer outcomes and then wonder why satisfaction is low and churn is high.
Lessons From Early Customer Service
My understanding of customer success began at Hewlett Packard, in a customer service centre that repaired test and measurement equipment for telecoms and military clients. It was deliberately not called a repair centre. The focus was on service and on what success looked like for the customer: equipment working in its best possible condition and a positive experience from end to end.
That meant doing more than fixing faults. If a unit came in scratched, we repainted it. If a customer struggled with new IT products, we went above and beyond to make sure they ended up in a good place. The mindset was simple: successful customer outcomes first, internal efficiency second.
Later, as a level‑three support and a service manager in HP’s IT department, I noticed a pattern. Most of my peers stayed behind their desks, handling escalations through tickets and calls but rarely went out to meet the users they served. I preferred to walk the building, sit with people at their desks and see their issues first‑hand.
Back in the early nineties, many users were uncomfortable with technology and their skills were limited. Yet it took very little time sitting next to them to understand the real problem and resolve it. That experience shaped how I approached customers from then on: go to them, understand their context and focus on successful outcomes, not just closing tickets.
How Many Companies Got Customer Success Wrong
Fast‑forward over 30 years and many organisations still treat customer service as a cost centre that must be squeezed. When they apply technology, the primary goal is often cost reduction: outsourcing offshore, reducing headcount or deploying chatbots without rethinking the experience.
The success metrics are internal: money saved, calls deflected, tickets cleared. The reasons customers contact them in the first place – failed orders, unresolved faults, broken promises – are barely considered in the design.
Chatbots illustrate this problem well. They can be excellent when used properly, but in many cases, they act as a holding pen to hit a service‑level agreement. Customers type in all their details, go back and forth with the bot and then get told to speak to an agent anyway.
Often, none of the information collected is passed on, so the customer must repeat everything from scratch. It is a frustrating, time‑wasting experience that signals clearly: your time is less valuable than our efficiency.
There are positive counter‑examples. Amazon’s hand‑off from chatbot to human agent is usually smooth; the agent has all the context and resolves issues quickly. Apple similarly invests in making support interactions effective and outcome‑focused.
Contrast that with providers like O2, where my own experience has involved a simple issue dragging on for two years without resolution. The error is small for them, but the effort, time, and frustration fall entirely on the customer.
Putting the Burden of Success on the Customer
This mindset shows up in other areas too. I recently ordered an item from an e‑business whose website showed it in stock with an expected delivery date. That date came and went; only when I chased did they admit it was still being made.
Another week passed. After chasing again, I was told it had “just been shipped.” What should have been a five‑to‑seven‑day delivery took well over two weeks and every update came only because I pursued them.
When customers share negative feedback publicly, some companies respond with, “Why didn’t you come back to us and tell us there was a problem?” They try to shift the responsibility for fixing their process onto the very customers they have disappointed yet the company already has the data to act proactively. They could easily identify orders where promised shipping dates were missed, investigate the reasons, contact affected customers with updates and perhaps offer a small goodwill gesture. It would not cost much, but it would require the organisation to prioritise the customer’s outcome, not just their own internal metrics.
Customer Success in the Outcome Economy
So, what does good customer success look like in the outcome economy? A simple starting point is to ask: why is the customer contacting you and what outcome are they trying to achieve?
In most environments, the reasons fall into a relatively small number of categories – often around ten – covering typical problems and needs. With today’s tools (AI, knowledge bases, video guides on platforms such as YouTube or social media), it is easier than ever to guide customers to a successful outcome quickly and consistently.
Used well, technology can make the experience much richer and more rewarding than it was in the eighties and nineties. But that only happens if you design from the outside in: start with the customer’s desired outcome and experience, then apply technology to enable it.
The Cost of Not Caring: Commoditisation and Churn
If you do not put customer outcomes front and centre, you force customers to judge you on the few dimensions they can see clearly: mainly price and basic functionality. When everyone’s experience is poor, scripted and unhelpful, customers rightly ask, “Why pay more?”
That leads to a race to the bottom. If interaction after interaction feels tedious and unfulfilling, customers will simply choose the cheapest provider because they feel no emotional or experiential attachment to any of them.
The shift away from landlines is a good example. Landlines were once a staple of everyday life, with their own strengths: they worked in power cuts and provided a reliable dial tone. Over time, investments focused elsewhere, service deteriorated and alternatives like mobile and broadband‑based calling improved.
For many households, landlines no longer provide enough value to justify the cost or hassle. People keep broadband, use voice over IP and messaging apps and drop the line entirely. In many ways, poor service and lack of investment accelerated that shift.
B2B Still Means “Human to Human”
In business‑to‑business contexts, infrastructure and technical reliability are often stronger, but there is a persistent myth that B2B interactions require less emotional intelligence. That is simply not true.
When I worked as an architect, we talked about functional and non‑functional requirements. Functional requirements covered features, functions and performance - the things sales teams like to focus on. Non‑functional requirements were often seen as someone else’s problem.
In reality, those non‑functional requirements, usability, responsiveness, reliability, support, integration and so on, are how customers measure success. They define whether the customer feels confident, supported and willing to stay with you over time.
We know this but we often push it aside because it is harder to quantify and own.
The outcome economy makes this avoidance dangerous: non‑functional requirements may become your only meaningful differentiator.
Ignore them and customers will leave.
Designing Services Around Customer Success Outcomes
Talking about “delightful customer experience” while ignoring customer outcomes is just lip service. The good news is that doing the right thing is not especially complicated.
You can start by:
Bringing customer needs and outcomes front and centre in how you design services and processes.
Treating non‑functional requirements as core success criteria, not afterthoughts.
Using technology – chatbots, AI, knowledge bases, video content, to genuinely guide customers to successful outcomes, not just to deflect contact.
Proactively monitoring where you miss your own SLAs and reaching out to make things right.
When you do this, revenue efficiency and cost savings become byproducts of a well-designed experience rather than the only goal. You also reduce staff churn in call centres and support teams by giving them better tools and clearer, more meaningful success measures.
Customers rarely want to leave. They leave when they are ignored, frustrated and forced to do all the work to get basic issues resolved. Put their outcomes at the heart of your design, and you turn customer success from a complaints function into a powerful engine of loyalty and growth.
The Stratavus Outcome Economy Series
This is the fourth post in a five part series about the Outcome Economy. The series is a short introduction to all aspects of the Outcome Economy.
The Outcome Economy From A Customer Success Perspective (this post)
What The Outcome Economy Looks Like In Practice
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.
Comments