Leverage Your Customers’ Success
April 2009
A successful customer is your best advertisement. You have successful customers, (you wouldn’t still be in business if you didn’t) so why not tell the world? Customer success stories (case studies) give you the opportunity to showcase customer success, proving your product’s value, functionality and benefits.
One of my clients has set up a ‘showcase’ area on their web site and has been adding customer success stories at the rate of about 3 or 4 per month. The customers are pleased to participate – many are quite excited to be recognized for their accomplishments. Another is continuing with a series of success stories (about one per month) despite severe cuts in their marketing budget. They obviously see tremendous value in this modest investment.
Here’s the usual process: Ask your account reps and business partners to identify successful customers. Contact the customer and ask if they would help you by participating in a case study write-up. Schedule and conduct a phone interview; this usually takes less than one hour of the customer’s time. The writer will then document the story and pass it to you for editing. The story is then passed to the customer for comment and approval. The customer provides a couple of photos and a high-resolution logo image. The story is formatted and is then ready to go. Completed stories can be loaded onto web sites and printed as handouts for conferences, trade shows and literature packs. The whole process rarely takes more than two weeks unless there are delays in the review and approval process.
One of our clients has an annual awards presentation, held during the user group conference, where they recognize ‘most improved’ and ‘best overall use’ customers for each of their products. Prior to the presentation, each customer story is written in a standardized one-page format for distribution at the conference and later inclusion on the company’s web site. Customers love the recognition and avidly compete for these awards. We typically complete more than a dozen interviews and write-ups in less than a month before the conference.
Your success as a software or system provider is based on the success of your customers in using your system to generate real business benefits. You can recognize your customers’ success while proving the value of your offerings with customer stories. This is a specialty area for us. Click here to see samples of our work. Or contact Dave to discuss how customer stories can help further establish the value and benefits of your products.