Creating a Meaningful Customer Case Study

The IdeaScale team with one of our case study interview subjects.

In B2B sales, case studies are the stories about your business. Telling stories is one of the most powerful ways to inspire and influence. New research has come out that demonstrates how narrative can galvanize a movement or disarm it. The reason these stories are so powerful is because they give shape to facts, they allow us to see ourselves in a situation that we aren’t currently in.

Good customer case studies should have a few key qualities:

1. They should be brief. The human attention span is shrinking at an alarming rate.

2. They should be written about people more than organizations. Even if you’re serving an entire business, there are usually humans at the center of the story.

3. They should demonstrate meaningful change. This is a story, after all, and all stories begin in one place and end in another.

Here are the steps to creating a meaningful customer case study:

1. First you have to identify someone who has a story to tell. At IdeaScale, I did this by looking for advocates in three places: high NPS respondents, people who had advocated for us in some other way in the past (say sharing resources in our LinkedIn group or writing a review for us online), or stories from our customer success team. Two weeks after NPS survey results came in, all 9s and 10s should be flagged for brand advocacy outreach. I also scheduled a brief, quarterly check-in meeting with all account managers wherein we would create a shortlist of potential advocates. At the end of those meetings, I would have a hit list of particular contacts to whom I would reach out.

2. Next, get in contact with your potential brand advocate. I’d email each of our contacts with the same basic set of information (personalized based on what I learned about them from my research, conversations, and their NPS feedback):

Hi there FIRSTNAME,

I’m NAME and I work with IdeaScale’s customer success team.

I was recently talking to ACCOUNTMANAGER about RECENTSUCCESS and given all that you’ve learned and accomplished so far, I was wondering if you would be willing to sit for a case study interview with someone on our marketing team. It’s a fairly simple process:

• You either respond to a few written questions (samples below) or schedule a time to talk to someone on the marketing team in the coming weeks and we’ll go through the questions in a conversation (usually just takes 20-30 minutes).

• From there, our team drafts up a one page case study to which you’ll offer feedback and corrections. Nothing is published without your review. All of your feedback will be accounted for before anything goes live.

• Once approved, we publish the case study to our resources page alongside other successful IdeaScale customers like NASA, Marriott, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and others.

So basically - if you’re willing to participate - the only thing I need from you is some 30-minute windows on your calendar. Send along some times that work and I'll find one that works for me.

Looking forward to speaking more!

NAME

Sample Questions:

1. How were you organizing feedback and creating change before IdeaScale?

2. Why did you originally decide to launch a crowdsourcing initiative?

3. What was your communications strategy to increase engagement? What was different about this initiative? Did you see any significant growth in your community?

4. What were the implemented ideas? Are there any metrics/measurable results associated with those implemented ideas?

5. Who suggested the implemented ideas? Anything surprising or interesting about your contributors? How did they feel about participating?

6. What was your process for identifying and selecting ideas?

7. How many ideas shared? Votes? Comments? Ideas Implemented?

8. Was there any other value to the campaign beyond the implemented ideas? If yes, what?

9. What was your favorite thing about this initiative?

3. Do a deep research dive based on your conversation with the brand advocate and any other available research. Obviously, the interview with the customer is the richest source of information and you can always probe for more details, but I would also spend some time on the contact’s site learning about their company and their challenges, checking news sources for additional information, and looking at system data. From there, I would craft a written case study that followed this basic format:

• An introduction to the customer and their company

• An overview of the challenge that they were facing

• The solution that they implemented to address that challenge

• Any results (particularly metrics-driven results) as a consequence of their new solution

• A review of best practices, next steps, and takeaways. It was often nice to capture a key testimonial quote in this section, as well.

It’s important to lead with a catchy title, make the content scannable for those who won’t read every word, pull quotes, and supporting visuals if necessary.

4. Send your draft for approval. This is your first draft, but it’s helpful to put it into the final format or template that you’ll use so that the customer can envision it when they’re approving it. I would often send them a styled PDF with an accompanying word document so that they could make changes themselves. It was also helpful to get the conversation started on approvals. If you have a media release form or something that they could show to their legal or marketing team to make sure that they were comfortable with the language, I would send this at the same time.

5. Generally, there is a period of back and forth: questions with legal, adjustments to the language, new details that emerge and most of these are managed over email. This is the stage that can make case studies take a long time to complete.

6. Create shareable materials. Now that everyone has approved the final copy and you have permission from their team to publish, do a final round of design in your brand’s template. However, telling this story shouldn’t just promote your company, it should promote the success of the advocate, as well. For that reason, I like to create a second case study report in the client’s brand identity using Canva. Format it in their brand colors, use their brand imagery and fonts and send it back to them for them to publish wherever they might want, as well. This is a shared story - not just your story.

7. Create the TL;DR version of your content. Most case studies should be two-pages max, but some people won’t even read that. Create a shortened version, a tweet-sized version, and numerous other tidbits that help to tell the story in a brief amount of time.

8. Publish and promote. It’s not enough to just get this story on your website - you have to find an audience for that story. Look for people who match your advocate’s profile - you could even promote it to bloggers or other press who might like to write about it. HARO is a great resource here.

9. Most importantly, thank your brand advocate. Your brand advocates have not only been a loyal customer, they have taken the time out of their daily duties to tell a story with you. You should honor that gift of time and attention, by sending them a “thank you.” At IdeaScale, I’d use the Loop & Tie Salesforce integration to schedule an appropriate gift to go to the contact on the day that the case study published. I’d use the subject line “Thank you for telling your story” and send some copy thanking them with a link to the final case study so that they’d know where to find it (and how to share it). I’d use the custom imagery that Loop & Tie let me upload so that the communication appears official. This sort of gift plus personalized “thank you” will stick in the mind of your advocate and hopefully keep them interested in completing other brand advocacy actions in the future.