It’s no secret that Customer Success Stories are important. Case Studies and long-form testimonials can be a great way to show off your organization’s successes, and they can help recruit new customers. But writing Customer Success Stories can be a lot of work. Here are some ideas to help you improve your productivity when writing Customer Success Stories.
Choose the right customer.
Think strategically and identify your customers to whom your prospective customers will relate. It’s very tempting to collect case stories from your best customers, but if they don’t match your future customers, your target audience will not resonate with your messages. If all your stories are clustered around one product, one feature, one location, they won’t have the same appeal as those that can appeal to a broader audience. Avoid waste by collecting stories that matter to your prospects.
Identify if the customer can advocate as early as possible.
Save hours spent on stories that can’t be approved by writing into your client contract the requirement for your client to help publish a customer story upon successful completion. While it’s not enforceable, it can identify early in the customer journey that a client can not provide a story for policy and reasons. In addition, ask the customer directly at the start of the advocacy process to approve the story and qualify the story lead further by asking if their organization regularly approves stories.
Include these answers as factors in the prioritization of customer story leads. Sometimes it’s better to collect a good story with a good chance of approval success rather than spend time creating a perfect story that can’t get approved.
Collect stories in your sleep.
Ask your customer to identify their success stories with a ‘Tell us your story button’ or link at the bottom of your email signatures. They won’t all be usable, but there will be some gems along the way from storytellers in your customer base that you can reach out to and expand further to create case studies.
Use your internal resources first.
Use your Customer Success Managers or Account Executives to identify the clients that match your target customers. Provide a survey (preferably a conversational survey) that is easy to complete and collects the required implementation data before auto-generating a customer success story and case study.
Use automation where you can
Use tools like Zapier to automate manual tasks such as sending Net Promoter Surveys to identify advocates at delight points of your customer journey. Create automatic responses to those interested and add them to a list of advocates in your CRM.
Transcription and AI language tools
Transcription is now a mature technology that saves time if the customer interview is recorded. However, there is still additional work to take the transcription and convert it to the third person and make a story from it. Use AI tools to convert the transcript and convert it to the third person to reduce the manual work further.
Use product marketing messaging tools.
If you have a product or service, you’ll want to make the messaging centred around your pain point and the solution to the pain point. Use AI products to build the messages that relate to your product, its features and the outcomes the customer has experienced (while still making your client look like the hero).
Change your’ request for an interview’ to a ‘give and complete’.
Improving your response rates by only a small margin will significantly reduce the amount of time spent chasing and will allow improving the quality of the stories collected. Using stories auto-created by the CSM’s and AE’s will change the ask to a ‘give’ and show positive results. This means you can spend less time interviewing about topics your organization knows about and more time building the relationship between you and your client.
Reduce approval failure rate
The default answer of PR and Communications teams is often ‘No’. But sometimes, pushing back can recover a story. Consider the following to recover the story:
- converting the story to an anonymous story
- converting it to a private story with limited use.
- Re-framing the story to a guide.
- removing all endorsements
Manage your story funnel
Keep track of which leads are at which stage of the story process and find out which story leads need nudging along. Don’t let story leads fall through the cracks and go cold.
Publish everywhere
Re-use your stories and share the great content throughout the buyers’ journey. Maximize the content extracted from each story to product quotes in various formats.
Try following these ideas above if you want to be productive when writing your customer stories. And if you don’t have time to do all of this yourself, Wizu can help. It automates many of these tasks for you to focus on crafting a story that will resonate with your customers and drive conversions.