Are Your Customer Success Stories are on the Mark?

A potential client recently asked me an interesting question. She had been using freelance writers to create customer success stories, and some of them were missing the mark. The stories didn’t reflect the proper messaging nor did they adequately detail customer benefits. She asked what my process was to ensure that I could produce a case study that told customer stories effectively.

That’s such a good question that I’m answering it in a series of blog posts. This first post describes what you need to know to plan for your interview with the customer, the second post will discuss how to assemble a questionnaire and conduct the interview, and the third details considerations for how to take your case studies to the next level.

Getting to the Heart of the Story

My process starts with carefully planning what I’ll need to get out of my interview with the customer. In particular, I want to know the overall flow of the story, background on the customer, what details I should probe with regards to the vendor’s product or service, and what return on investment (ROI) the customer might expect to achieve.

1.       A Big Picture Outline

Case studies tend to follow a formula. I look at my customers’ existing case studies to see what their formula is and use that as a starting point. Generally, this outline includes:

• The protagonist—In this case the customer. Who is the customer? What do they do? Why are they interesting?
• The challenge--What was the business challenge the customer faced that caused them to consider the particular solution? This challenge should tie into the customer’s overall goals for their business—and typically concerns the need to drive revenue, reduce costs, improve the customer experience, or enhance regulatory compliance.
• How the customer found your solution and why they chose it.
• Some case studies describe the implementation process. This is particularly true for case studies that will be used in later stages of the sales cycle. It’s also important in markets where ease of implementation is a critical consideration. For example, healthcare providers are often extremely wary of how technology will impact their workflow and want to be sure that the process of switching to an automated system won’t take up too much of their time or be too disruptive. 
• How the customer used the solution to overcome their challenges.
• Benefits achieved from using the solution

 2.       Background on the Customer

It always helps to know about the customer before you interview them for the case study. At the very least, I look at their website to learn relevant background. You can also Google to see if they’ve been in the news recently and what the news was about.

3.       Understand the Solution’s Messaging  

While asking the customer questions based strictly on the outline above is a good start, I like to know more about my client’s product or service to ensure I probe the right issues in my interview. In particular, I want to learn:

• What the product/solution is.
• What it does and how it works to solve the customer’s problem.
• What are the solution’s differentiators? What makes the product or service unique?
• What are the key benefits of the solution?

 4.       Determine What Metrics to Gather  

One of the most valuable components of any customer success story is the quantifiable results the customer is able to achieve. These numbers validate the vendor’s claims. Before interviewing the customer, the savviest vendors lay the groundwork for a strong ROI story by doing the following: 

• Instructing their sales force or support team to work closely with the customer to help them identify opportunities for ROI. For example, one health IT vendor helps its physician customers explore how the solution reduces the number of full-time equivalent(FTEs) employees through elimination of the need to pull paper records, lowers expenses for medical charting supplies, cuts transcription costs, and increases revenues by enabling physicians to more accurately code patient visits.
• Providing the writer with a list of metrics that are important for the customer to report on. For example, a workforce-management product can reduce labor costs through more effective scheduling that eliminates the need for overtime. The vendor might want the writer to ask the customer about cost reduction figures in this in this area. 

Whipping up a good case study is like fixing a recipe. You have to first assemble the ingredients. With a case study, those ingredients include the high level outline, the messaging for the solution the case study will discuss, and a list of relevant metrics.

In next week’s installment, I’ll talk about how to combine the ingredients together.