An ultimate aim is what customers, employees, partners seek in their life or business through your brand.
The concept of customers’ desired outcomes throughout the customer experience originated in innovation literature when Clayton Christensen wrote his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, explaining that customers “hire” a product or service to get something done for them.
When we understand the circumstances motivating the customer to hire a product or service, then we gain insight into the customer’s jobs-to-be-done.
(ultimate aim = desired outcome = job-to-be-done)
By really understanding customers’ jobs-to-be done, constraints, work-arounds, hassles, and other elements of their world, new insights emerge for superior alignment with customers.
Adopt the customers’ jargon — don’t make them adopt yours. Cater to the customers’ world — don’t make them cater to yours. Your jargon and world are customer satisfaction enablers, or a means-to-an-end toward customers’ desired outcomes.
The outcomes are the direct link to re-purchase behavior and propensity to recommend a brand. In the end, it’s only the outcomes that matter.
It’s a paradigm shift for companies to quit concentrating on product and service features (customer satisfaction enablers; secondary focus), and to instead concentrate on helping the customer get a job done faster, more conveniently, and less expensively than before (customers’ desired outcomes; primary focus).
A great experience happens when what’s received matches or exceeds what was promised.
This may be in the moment, but more importantly, it’s a series of consistent occurrences, since customer experience is cumulative.