Does anyone really want to read another success story about how a software company changed a customer’s life? But testimonials, case studies, and customer stories are ubiquitous across industries. Everywhere you look, companies are investing in written testimonials and marketing videos to showcase how much better a customer is after finding their product.
Surely there has to be value in sharing them.
Why bother telling customer success stories?
A few months ago, we began focusing on our customer stories. While attending industry conferences and hosting small in-person events, we’d heard interest from customers in learning about how other customers were using Help Scout. We were also hearing from customers about new ways they were using the product that we hadn’t evangelized before — like how their team was transitioning from a shared email inbox to a multiple mailbox approach or was working with Zapier in creative ways to connect to other productivity tools like Asana.
While companies have marketing teams behind their websites, stories from the actual folks who are using the products bring these messages to light in a different way than a traditional copy.
So the question of whether or not to tell customer success stories is solved: you should. Now — how do you move it from “See how we stay SaaS-y” to something people actually want to read?
10 lessons for telling customer success stories
Here’s what I’ve learned about how to tell a compelling customer story.
1. It’s not about you
Approaching the project of telling customer stories, I thought I was coming at it from the right angle. It was simple, really: Anyone who was reading these stories wanted to know how Help Scout could change their lives, too, right?
I prepared a set of questions that would serve as a guide through the interviews, such as:
How do you use workflows?
What are your favorite features — @mentions, Tags, etc.?
But after a second look at how a few of the stories were shaping up, it was clear that the approach wasn’t working. What was so wrong with it?
It’s that my toolkit was inherently biased. I was using these probing questions as a way to get answers out of customers quickly — I was grateful for their time and didn’t want to waste it — but the reality was, I was injecting my point of view by asking these types of questions.
While the solution and how the tool is used are definitely helpful — not talking about how the product is used at all isn’t helpful for anyone — when telling stories, there has to be a bigger focus on the customer
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