Assembling the Ingredients for a Successful Case Study

In my last post, I talked about what you need to gather as you get ready to create a customer case study. Now I’ll talk about how to combine and cook up the ingredients to prepare a compelling success story.

Developing the Questionnaire

With the high-level outline, the messages you want to convey, and a list of the metrics you hope to obtain, you now have everything you need to put together a questionnaire for your interview with the customer. My questionnaire generally follows the high-level outline I discussed in the last post. But I also drill down where necessary with more specific questions to ensure that I bring out all the relevant points the vendor wants to make. For example, I typically ask about:

• Relevant company background.
• The challenge the customer faced that caused him or her to consider the vendor’s solution.
• The process the customer followed to make their selection and why they chose the vendor. Here I can probe the customer about whether and how the vendor’s stated differentiators influenced the decision.
• How the customer uses the solution. Again, I ask questions that pertain to the vendor’s messaging. For example, if the vendor touts its product’s ability to improve labor scheduling to avoid overtime and eliminate understaffing, I’ll want to ask if the customer uses that capability and what the results were.
• Quantifiable results. Again, my questionnaire will incorporate a list of all the ROI measures the vendor thinks are important. I can run them by the customer and determine whether they apply to the customer’s particular application. 

Conducting the interview

Although I do extensive preparation for interviews, I don’t go through all the questions in order when I actually talk to the customer.

The interview should be a conversation. My goal is for customers to tell their stories in their own words because those words are far more powerful than generic marketing speak. To that end, I start off by asking open-ended questions about the customers’ business challenges, how they solved those challenges with the help of the vendor’s solution, and the benefits they achieved.   

I give the customer plenty of time to come up with answers in their own words by continually asking, “Is there anything else?” I then keep quiet to encourage them to speak more.

The questionnaire serves as a point of reference to ensure that I’ve covered all the bases by the end of the interview. Only when the customer has exhausted all their ideas will I go through my list of questions to make sure we’ve touched upon everything my client has deemed to be important.

Leaving the door open for follow up

Once the interview is complete, there’s always the possibility that I’ve missed something. I always ask if the customer for permission to get back in touch to ask follow-up questions.  

Writing the story

At this point, I have enough information to begin writing the story.

A business story is compelling to the extent that the customer is the hero and the story is about the customer’s challenges and how they overcame them. The vendor’s solution should be a supporting player; it’s the tool the customer uses overcome their challenges. The more you focus on the customer’s struggle, and allow them to discuss it in their own words, the better your story will be. That’s because your reader will put himself or herself in the customer’s shoes and reenact the story step-by-step in their minds' eye as they read it.

This is my recipe for creating a case study that both gets across the vendor’s messages and tells the customer’s story in their own words to give it credibility.

In my next post, the last of this three-part series, I’ll talk about how you can take your customer stories to the next level.

Comments

[Chris Slocumb]

Great timely info as I was just preparing for an interview. I believe it's important to review questions ahead of time to make sure you're not leading the customer in a positive direction. It doesn't have to be completely neutral - it's marketing, not the NY Times after all. But there should at least be a sense of neutrality and letting the customer voice both pros and cons.