Introduction

Skilful marketers understand the true power of customer stories to add credibility and authority to your marketing messages

So when you first begin gathering customer success stories, your first step is to think which stories you need to meet your marketing strategy. 

Strategy first

Ideally, you should aim to provide stories for all market segments, particularly the ones that your organization is likely to target in the future – which may be different to existing customers. Identify story needs for your organization upcoming activities and needs such as

• product launches
• events
• sales objections

For each need, speak to the stakeholders involved to find out the key purpose for the story. For example, if you wanted a story to overcome price objections, what would the best format be: a testimonial story, customer interview or a case study?

Take stock of what niches your current stories serve

For each story, categorize them by product, service, industry, problem, sales objections, and other data categories relevant to your business.

Very often there will be gaps missing for each high-level category above – these are the low hanging fruits that are easy to identify. Then cross-tabulate for each combination of categories. So for example, if you have a new Product A that only has a few stories that cover the ‘Real estate’ and ‘IT’ industries, but no stories for that Product A for the ‘Financial services’ sector that your Product is targeting – there is a gap there.

Prioritization of story needs

Once you have identified the gaps (and there will be many), prioritize the gaps based on meeting strategic objectives.

Stop order taking and take a proactive and strategic story collection approach.

Very often sales teams request stories for a particular industry/ product/ combination. Or, Customer Success teams recommend this client would be a good candidate for a story. While it’s great they are communicating with you; any story request should be considered in the broader organizational needs and the strategy to fulfil those needs.

Make it easy for stakeholders to suggest stories but ask they supply the additional data you need to prioritize, such as why you should collect the story. Use an automated tool such as Wizu to collect the request and thank the respondent.

It’s vital to communicate the strategy to all stakeholders and show the long term plan to keep their involvement high. Explain that any prioritization is not a ‘no’, but instead, there are more important stories for the organization.

Integrate your story capture into your automated feedback collection

Send your clients a Wizu Relationship Assessment survey. This short and engaging assessment includes the Net Promoter Score question, which provides useful insights on your most satisfied customers. If the clients are promoters, you can then ask how they would be willing to advocate for you: a story, a video, a reference, or speak at an event?

Wizu then collates and reviews the results, suggesting the best customer story opportunities for you based on the NPS Score and other answers in the assessment such as how they answered comment questions.

Laser-focused, data-driven customer targeting

Adopting an automated approach based on previous data analytics builds an efficient process that drives faster, stronger results. Building feedback collection into the end of your customer satisfaction journey ensures a constant supply of premium customer stories coming into your company. Cutting down on all the tracking and admin involved enables you to gear up without facing chaos or capacity issues.

‘Tell us your story’ buttons

Make it easy for your ‘raving’ advocates to leave an unsolicited testimonial by providing an automated interview. They are a great way to capture success stories, particularly after exceptional service when the customer is delighted. Not all will be strategically relevant to your marketing, but there is still value in capturing them and asking the customer to share on their network of choice.

Optimize your customer targeting process to drive the best results

Using Wizu platform right from the first step in the process to the end saves you time and effort and delivers the strongest, most persuasive and targeted customer story library you can build.