Interview to case study

What interview to case study is

Interview to case study takes one recorded conversation with a customer and turns it into the page that says what they came to you with, what was decided, and what happened afterwards. You already have the recording. This is the writing, and the approval, from that point on.

It is the middle link of a three-part chain. Customer interviews is me running the call, which matters because people tell a stranger things they will not tell their supplier. Case studies is the whole thing from booking the call to publication. This service is the part between them: you recorded the call yourself, or somebody else did, and it is sitting in a folder unwritten. It is not a testimonial, which is one quote, and it is not a transcript tidied up.

When you need one

You need this when a customer has already said good things on a recording. A sales call where they explained why they switched. An onboarding conversation. A recorded chat at a trade show. Most businesses have two or three of these and none of them have been written up.

The second case is a reference customer who has agreed to be one and whose time you do not want to spend twice. If they have already sat through an hour, going back to ask for another hour is how a willing customer becomes a busy one.

You do not need this if all you have is a warm sentence in an email. That is testimonial editing, which is a much smaller job. And if nobody has been interviewed yet, start with the call rather than with the writing.

What I need and what gets written

The input is a recording of thirty minutes or more with the customer audible, the name of the person who can approve it on their side, and whatever you can tell me about the numbers involved. A case study without a number is a story, and a story is worth less.

• The situation before. Stated in the customer's own words where possible, because their description of the problem is the sentence your next buyer recognises themselves in.
• The decision. Why they chose you, including what else they looked at. This is the section customers usually give freely on a call and almost never put in writing.
• What actually happened. The work, in enough detail to be credible, without turning the page into a description of your process.
• The result, with a figure. Whatever they can stand behind: hours, dollars, units, a timescale. If they cannot put a number on it, the page says what changed instead, plainly.
• Three or four direct quotes. Verbatim, timestamped, so nobody can later say they did not say it.

What you get

The case study. Eight hundred to twelve hundred words, structured as situation, decision, work, result, in an editable file and as clean HTML. One-page PDF version included, because that is the version a salesperson sends.

An approval pack. The draft laid out for the customer with every quote marked, plus the short covering email asking them to sign off, and a plain approval line for them to reply with.

A short version. The same story in about a hundred and fifty words, for a slide, a proposal or the proof strip on a service page.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Saskatoon industrial parts distributor has a forty-minute recorded call with a mining contractor's purchasing manager, made for internal reasons and never used. On it the manager explains that he was carrying three weeks of stock of a part he needed twice a year, and what changed when the distributor took it on consignment.

Written up, it becomes an eleven-hundred-word case study built around a figure the manager gives at minute twenty-six: the shelf space he got back. The draft goes to him with four quotes marked. He asks for one sentence to be removed, because it names a mine site, and approves the rest. His own marketing department is copied and asks for the company name to appear in full on first mention. That is the whole approval, and it takes nine days. The distributor now has the one page its salespeople send to every other contractor with the same stocking problem.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What is on the recording, who the customer is, and who on their side can say yes. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Per case study, agreed before anything starts.
3. The files. You send the recording and any figures you can supply from your own side of the job.
4. The draft. Transcribed and written in five to seven working days, and you see it before the customer does.
5. Approval. The pack goes to the named person on the customer's side. Budget a fortnight. If their marketing or legal team is involved, budget three weeks and expect the company name and any figure to be the two things queried.
6. Delivery. The approved case study, the PDF, and the short version, with the approval reply kept on file.

On who signs off: it is the person who was interviewed, and then whoever in their business owns the brand. Both. Getting one without the other is how a published page gets pulled three months later.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on the length of the recording, whether figures have to be chased, and how many approvers sit on the customer's side. Chasing the approval is included in the price rather than billed as extra time, because it is the part that decides whether the page exists. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working.

What happens next

Most people publish one, watch the sales team use it, and then want three or four more, at which point the sensible buy is having the interviews run for you rather than waiting for a recording to happen by chance. The finished page usually wants a shorter, warmer companion for readers who skip case studies, which is a customer story. And if sign-off across everything you publish is slow, the wider fix is approval management. One case study from one recording is complete work on its own, and nothing further is assumed.