Outcome as a Service: What Is The Impact On Your Professional Service Organization?

Customers are changing the way they buy. Rather than buying products and software, they increasingly want outcomes and are willing to invest in the ongoing services that will help them achieve those outcomes. This type of service model, called Outcome-as-a-Service, is the fastest growing trend in the professional services industry. Aligning the incentives of the professional service organization (PSO) and the customer toward the end result of capturing the ROI of implemented technology makes total sense. So what does this mean for your professional services business? 

Current Business Impacts

For the customer, this type of engagement provides assurance that the professional services firm shares the risk, which provides a better guarantee of the outcome by rewarding the result instead of the effort.

For the professional services firm, an outcome-based engagement provides great incentive to innovate and ensure the customer gets the best out of the deployed technology that goes beyond a successful implementation. It means full and extended adoption and best practices.

Of course, getting to the point where PSOs can actually deliver, control, and measure the long-term adoption of technology will require many changes and new capabilities for technology and the organization.

Current System Impacts

So what are the required systems to manage this new approach?

As PSOs continue to evolve and add managed and adoption services to their offering portfolio, they find that beyond the significant service delivery transformation, their underlying processes and systems are not built to support these new services.  

CRM systems track initial sales (and commissions related to them) but maintaining and expanding managed and adoption services are more a function of the delivery and support team performance than the initial engagement. PSA systems ...