Customer stories

What a customer story is

A customer story is a page about one real customer, written as a narrative. It opens with a person in a situation, follows what they decided and what happened, and ends with where they are now. The material is the same material a case study is built from. The shape is different, and the shape is the whole point.

It is not a case study, which sets out situation, decision, result and number under headings so a buyer can hold two side by side. It is not a testimonial, which is one quote lifted out of a longer conversation. And it is not invented: every fact comes from a recorded interview with a named customer who approves the page before it goes up.

There is a sales version of this material too, and it is a different job. Success stories are short and warm and sent by a salesperson mid-conversation; case studies for the sales team are shaped around one objection and handed over in a meeting. Both assume somebody is in the room. A website story is read by a stranger with nobody there to frame it.

When you need one

You need a customer story when your buyers do not read structured documents. Trades, retail, hospitality, clinics, home services: anything bought partly on feeling and mostly on trust. That reader does not want a summary block and four subheadings and will not compare suppliers on a grid. They want to recognise themselves in somebody else.

You need a case study instead when the buyer is a committee, a procurement officer or a technical lead who has to justify the choice to somebody above them. That reader wants the sequence and the number, and treats a narrative as evasion.

Most businesses need one of each rather than ten of both. One case study for the buyer who has to build a file, one story for the buyer reading on a phone at nine in the evening. If you already have a case study and the recording behind it, the story is cheaper than the first piece was, because the interview is already done. If nobody will talk to you yet, start with a customer interview and decide the format afterwards.

What goes in it

A story has no fixed sections, but it has a reliable spine, and I write to it.

• A person, named, in a specific week. Not “a client in the manufacturing sector”, but a named person, their job, and what was going wrong that month.
• The moment it became a problem. Every story has one: the order that was missed, the inspection that failed, the third supplier who did not call back. This is the sentence that makes a reader keep going.
• What they tried first. Usually not you. The honest account of the wrong turn is what makes the rest believable.
• What actually happened. The work, in the order it happened, in the customer's words wherever the transcript beats mine.
• Where they are now. A concrete present-tense ending. A number if the customer will approve one, and a specific, checkable description if they will not.

Quotes run through the story rather than sitting in a box at the end, and every one of them is attributed.

What you get

The interview. A recorded call of thirty to forty-five minutes with your customer, arranged by you and led by me. The recording and transcript are yours. If a case study has already been done with this customer, I work from that recording instead.

The story page. 600 to 900 words of narrative, with a headline, the pull quotes placed in the flow, the title tag and the meta description.

The short version. A 120-word telling of the same story, for the home page, a service page or an email.

The approval record. The exact text the customer signed off, dated, so nobody is guessing two years later about what was agreed.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A husband-and-wife landscaping firm outside Guelph has one case study on its site, written for a property management company, and it is doing its job with property managers. It is doing nothing at all with homeowners, who are two thirds of the revenue and who leave the page within seconds.

The interview is with a retired teacher whose back garden flooded every spring for six years. The story opens on the March morning she found her husband's workshop under three inches of water, moves through the two contractors who quoted and never returned, and covers the drainage work over eleven days in October, including the day the crew found the old clay tile nobody knew was there. It ends the following spring with a dry workshop and her line about finally planting something that lives. The page is 780 words. The short version goes on the drainage service page, and the property management case study stays where it is, for the reader it was written for.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which customer, which reader the story is for, and whether a case study would serve that reader better. No charge, and I will say so if it would.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of stories, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. The introduction. You ask the customer. They get one page from me explaining what the conversation covers and what they will approve.
4. The interview. Thirty to forty-five minutes, recorded, at their convenience.
5. The draft. Three to five working days after the interview. You check the facts, then it goes to the customer.
6. Approval and delivery. Their changes are made without argument, then the final page, the short version and the approval record.

Two to three weeks per story is usual, and most of that is waiting on calendars. Several run at once.

What it costs

A customer story is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size varies. What moves the number is whether an interview is needed or a recording exists, how many stories are in the set, and whether approval is a signature or a legal review. The pricing page shows the shape of the four ways of working. The figure is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

A story earns its keep when it sits beside the offer it supports, so the service page it belongs to usually gets the short version added. The quotes that did not fit often make a page of attributed quotes arranged by objection. If the same interview should also serve the buyer who wants the structured version, turning the recording into a case study uses material you have already paid for. This piece of work is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.