Four Keys to Writing Captivating Customer Stories
Carina Rampelt | May 17, 2022
Let’s be honest—writing customer stories is hard.
Even getting a customer to agree to participate can be a project in and of itself. (I’m still holding out hope I might hear back from a few promising candidates who ghosted me.) And that’s before you get to the interview—not to mention the writing process, approvals, and publication. Throw in a dry topic you’re supposed to somehow make interesting, a boss who’s addicted to jargon, or a customer’s PR team who wants to line edit your work, and you have your hands full. The path to great content never did run smooth.
With customer stories, you have to somehow achieve opposing, almost paradoxical goals: Make the customer look good while showing what a mess they were before they found your product. Demonstrate eye-popping results without embellishing what are often average improvements. Create a unique narrative while ticking all the boxes on your existing design template.
“With customer stories, you have to somehow achieve opposing, almost paradoxical goals: Make the customer look good while showing what a mess they were before they found your product.”
I’ve been there. Customer stories have become something of a specialty of mine: I’ve written 20-ish case studies for various clients in the past year alone. But I don’t just come at them from a marketing perspective—as a lover of literature (I even got my master’s in English from Oxford) I look to the greats for tried-and-tested storytelling techniques.
Drawing from my literary background and my firsthand experiences, I’ve uncovered a few tricks for making customer stories less painful for you to write and more pleasurable for customers to read. Specifically, I’ll share how you can learn from the best fiction writers to write captivating customer stories—from getting the right materials, to creating an enticing hook, to crafting a compelling narrative structure. Let’s dive in.
1. Investigate the story before choosing whether to proceed
Great customer stories are discovered, not invented. In other words, you have to select customers with a story to tell. It seems obvious, but there’s more to it than you might think. If your team flags a customer as a good candidate for a case study, it’s time to put on your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and do your own investigation.
Book 15 minutes with the person inside the company who spends the most time with that customer (this will likely be their account manager or CSM). Ask how they're using the product and what their journey has been like so far.
To make sure there’s a compelling enough narrative, you need to check for three core storytelling elements: plot, character, and setting. If all three are compelling, that’s a good sign you’re hot on the trail of a great customer story.
THE RAW ELEMENTS OF A GREAT CUSTOMER STORY
Full disclosure: I wrote or collaborated on all of the customer story examples included below.
A. THE PLOT
The story arc of a snooze-worthy customer story resembles a wet noodle, sloping gently towards a foregone conclusion. A compelling story, on the other hand, has peaks and valleys. You need to be able to build and release tension. (We’ll get into this in more detail in the section on building plot below.) Consider:
What problem has your customer been trying to solve?
What ups and downs have they experienced?
What was your customer’s life like before your product?
What results have they had so far?
Any exciting metrics?
What about memorable anecdotes?
Example of great plot: Lauren Wadsworth, a newbie SDR struggling to hit quota, goes on a whirlwind journey in this Vidyard customer story. Despite booking 26 meetings in a month (double her team’s average), her conversions lag behind. Half of her prospects cancel their meetings. She tries to add more volume to her funnel, but she’s just left feeling frustrated and burnt out. So she decides to try a different tack entirely. Will her experiment succeed? You’ll have to read the customer story to find out.
B. THE MAIN CHARACTER(S)
Another key part of an intriguing story is the protagonist (or protagonists)—which, with customer stories, is typically the person (or people) you interview. Try to figure out as much as you can about them before you set up time to chat. What is their role in the story? Are they close enough to the problem, process, and solution to share some interesting insights?
Their personality matters too. When you’re speaking with your customer’s primary contact, try to determine how enthusiastic they are about participating. Is the customer genuinely excited to share their story, or do they see it as a bit of a chore? Do they feel comfortable being open and honest about their experiences, or are they more likely to hold back?
Example of great character: Acoustic designer Tim Crossley stars in this Harvest customer story as a scrappy small business owner, along with his partner Matt Schaefer. When the two landed their first major contract, they weren’t registered as a business yet—so they had to scramble to submit their articles of organization to New York State. With no formal training, the two fumbled through the mechanics of running a company, particularly when it comes to billing their hours. Their authenticity and frankness about their experiences (especially the ones that didn’t go well) helps the reader instantly connect with them.
C. THE SETTING
Setting can be one of the trickiest elements to get right. Big companies whose logos you want to feature are unlikely to participate, because their legal and PR teams forbid it—or if they do agree, their reviewers will redline all of the interesting parts of your story. (PR, in its effort to sanitize, invariably wants to scrub the most interesting and divergent storylines.) Smaller brands who are eager for the publicity will rarely turn down an opportunity to be featured, but papering your website with unrecognizable logos won’t build much trust in your brand.
The best candidates for customer stories are often mid-size or up-and-coming brands—recognizable names, but ones that don’t have legions of legal and PR people watching their every move.
As you’re considering pursuing a story, ask yourself:
Does the customer’s industry and/or use case line up with your target audience?
Is their logo recognizable?
If they’re a big firm, will their legal/PR teams make it difficult to get the story published?
Example of great setting: This Welcome customer story features its customer Brex, a fast-growing neobank. Brex was the ideal candidate for a story like this because its startup credit card offering is well known, but the Brex team is still nimble enough that the approval process for this story was relatively easy and streamlined. (Part of this also comes down to the prep work that the Welcome team put in, which we’ll delve into in the next section.)
If you’ve reviewed the plot, character(s), and setting and determined there’s a compelling enough story there, great! Then you can move on to the next step.
2. Put in the pre-work to collect premium raw materials (and prevent pain later)
Your interview material can make or break your customer story. Creatives understand this intuitively. You can’t knit a soft sweater without the right yarn. You can’t cook a gourmet meal without fresh, delicious ingredients. You can’t write a captivating customer story without tantalizing quotes, metrics, and anecdotes.
Riviera Lev-Aviv, Senior Writer & Strategist at Fenwick, has already written a full guide to effective interviewing which I highly recommend, but customer story interviews have their own special considerations. Here’s how to make sure you walk away from your customer interviews with the juiciest details.
ESSENTIAL INTERVIEW PRE-STEPS
A. SEND AN INTERVIEW AGREEMENT
This is crucial—there’s nothing worse than going to all the trouble of doing the interview and writing a customer story, only to have your customer’s legal team kill it (or have it stuck in review purgatory for months). An easy solution to avoid this pain is to have your customer sign an interview agreement before you even schedule the interview.
Your agreement should give your customer informed consent on how you plan to use their interview material—signing it means they agree to your terms and can’t walk back their decision. This forces customers to get approval before scheduling the interview. If you do not have a signed interview agreement in hand, do not schedule an interview, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. (Psst, don’t have an interview agreement yet? Use our free template.)
B. CAPTURE KEY METRICS BEFORE CALLING
While it’s great to get concrete numbers you can reference in your story and use as pull stats, your interview time should be primarily focused on getting the context and anecdotes that will bring your story to life. In my experience, asking for specific metrics during an interview can derail the conversation, as customers poke around to try to find the specific stat you want (that is, if they’re keeping track at all).
Check to see if you can pull any numbers internally or ask your interviewee for their metrics via email ahead of time. That way, you can use your interview time to follow up with specific questions. If an idea for a particular stat occurs to you mid-conversation, it’s wise to save it for a follow-up email.
C. PREP YOUR CUSTOMER WITH PERSONALIZED QUESTIONS
Share your questions in advance of your conversation so your customer can start thinking about their responses. If they feel prepared, they’ll be more relaxed and excited to share.
To create a compelling list of questions, it’s important to do your research. In addition to chatting with their CSM, make sure to read your customer’s website and check out your interviewee(s)’s LinkedIn profile(s)—this will enable you to better understand their challenges, how they’re using the product to solve them, and any compelling anecdotes or features you should focus on. For instance, “Tell me about the interactive terrarium-building activity you hosted at your virtual HR conference” is a much more evocative prompt than “How are you using our platform to host engaging virtual events?”
If you struggle to come up with good customer story interview questions, feel free to borrow from my list of base questions below—just personalize to your customer.
Want an editable, text version of this question list? Grab the free Google Docs template here.
Now that you have great materials, it’s time to finesse them into an intriguing story.
3. Hook them and the rest is history
The first few sentences in a customer story are the most important in the entire piece—it’s where your reader will decide whether it’s worth their time to keep reading. Yet, many case studies squander this precious real estate by filling them with meaningless bits of trivia about the company size, number of employees, or what countries they operate in. “It's like a template for the most boring dating profile ever,” as Fenwick’s Editor in Chief, Chris Gillespie, puts it.
“The first few sentences in a customer story are the most important in the entire piece.”
Like a great dating profile, you need to entice your reader to want to find out more. What’s so interesting about this customer? What makes their story with your product so compelling? Here are some of my favorite types of hooks, along with examples.
A. START WITH CHARACTER
All great stories have a hero. One effective way to hook your readers is to give them a taste of your end user’s personality. Don’t worry about alienating readers who might have different circumstances—specificity gives people something to relate to. As the old storytelling adage goes, “the more personal, the more universal.”
Here’s a great example of a customer story that starts with a character portrait: “Web design company Juicyorange was born in the back of a tour bus, in between acid jazz gigs (it was the 1990s). It might be an unusual origin story for a digital agency, but for its founder, drummer-turned-web designer Mark Robohm, it made perfect sense.”
B. START WITH PLOT
A common strategy for fiction writers is to begin in medias res—that is, right in the middle of the action. You can borrow the same strategy for your case study by starting with the customer’s challenges. You’ll leave your reader curious to know how they solved their problem.
Here’s a great example of a customer story that starts with a plot twist: “In the final months of 2019, Shanghai-based Pudong Bank was preparing for a year that would turn out nothing like expected. Its 26th anniversary loomed in January. The stock was doing well and all was quiet. Raju Chokshi, the head of compliance, was just getting everything sorted to explore ways to record calls across devices—a long-term initiative, and one of many. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.”
C. START WITH SETTING
Another great way to open is to set the scene. Often in customer stories, this can mean describing the customer’s business landscape, rather than the physical geography they operate in (though if it’s relevant to the story, the physical setting could work too). This type of approach works best for customers that come from unique industries or have unusual business models.
Here’s a great example of a customer story that starts by setting the scene: “RANA is more than just a design studio with an ecological consciousness. They see themselves as a ‘co-habitat company’—creating spaces for people and nature to coexist in harmony.”
If you put together an intriguing introduction, your customers will be compelled to keep reading—they’ll want to see where this is going. And if you’ve done the work of collecting the right materials in the previous step, finding the right tidbit to start on should be easy.
4. Build a plot like the best fiction writers
When you’re writing a customer case study, you want to follow a compelling story arc—after all, that’s the whole point of telling a customer story. Yet countless customer stories fall short of this goal because they lack a clear sense of how to build and resolve tension. So many follow the same staid template—something to the effect of “challenge,” “solution,” and “results.” But a plot isn’t just “one thing after another, a what and a what and a what” as Margaret Atwood once wrote. There needs to be motivation, tension, setbacks, and a cause to root for. There’s a reason why storytelling structures like the hero’s journey have persisted throughout history.
“Many customer stories fail to create a compelling story arc because they lack a clear sense of how to build and resolve tension. ”
To create a compelling story structure, we can borrow from the masters: fiction writers. Most novelists follow some kind of system for plotting their books. John Grisham spends months creating his outlines, writing detailed summaries of each chapter, before he even starts writing a new book. Agatha Christie would start by concocting a crime, then fill in the story around it. Bestselling young adult author Robyn Schneider has even shared the detailed Scrivener template she uses to plot her novels, which you can download if you want to try her approach. But while useful for understanding story structure, these multi-act storyboards are probably overkill for those of us writing customer stories.
That’s why I personally prefer Derek Murphy’s eight-step plot diagram, a simplified structure loosely based on the hero’s journey. Below, I’ve adapted his version for a B2B spin on the hero’s journey that you can use when writing customer stories.
A B2B Customer’s Journey, based on Derek Murphy’s eight-step plot diagram. (Your ninth-grade English teacher would be proud.)
Ordinary world: Paint a picture of the status quo for your hero (aka your customer). What does their daily life look like? What are their hopes and dreams? What do they lack?
Inciting incident: Your hero faces a new challenge at work, or an existing challenge morphs into something impossible to live with. What forces them to act?
First pinch point: What does your hero do to try to solve this challenge? Does it work (for a time)?
Midpoint: The temporary solution becomes untenable. How did it fail? What prompts the hero to look for a more permanent fix?
Dark night of the soul: The hero despairs of ever solving their problem. Everything looks bleak.
Magical object: Just when all hope seems lost, the hero comes across your product/service. Could it be the solution they’re looking for?
Final battle: With the help of this newfound tool, your hero vanquishes their challenges once and for all.
Riches and rewards: What exciting results do they reap thanks to solving this problem? (Revenue, recognition, mental health benefits, etc.)
New status quo: What does their life look like now? How have things permanently improved for the better? What opportunities can they now consider that they weren’t able to before?
Don’t worry about memorizing this list (there won’t be a pop quiz, I promise), but do keep it around as a resource. Once you’ve written as many customer stories as I have, you’ll start to notice these things when you’re sussing out the story in your initial conversation with the customer’s account manager. Soon, you’ll be able to judge relatively quickly whether there are enough challenges, setbacks, and rewards to create a story that’ll keep your audience on the edge of their seat.
Think like a reader
“Easy reading is damned hard writing,” or so Mark Twain supposedly said. As the fiction writer would know, telling an intriguing customer story isn’t easy—you need to source the best quotes and anecdotes, create an enticing hook, and build a compelling plot structure that will propel your reader along. But by borrowing these strategies from fiction writers (plus some hard-won insights of my own), you’ll be able to avoid the most common pitfalls and make the process a little smoother. More importantly, you’ll create a captivating reading experience for your audience that will make your end product that much more memorable. You’ll be able to rest easy knowing that as hard as you work on your customer stories, they’re working just as hard on your behalf.
Read some of the customer stories mentioned in the article:
How a top SDR doubled her meeting to opportunity conversion rate
How an acoustics company keeps time with Harvest
How a fully remote company uses Welcome to host unbelievably good meetings
Cultivating a thriving team ecosystem with Harvest
In just 15 days, SPD provides ‘stress-free’ way for RMs to compliantly text
How a Global Bank and a Lending Startup both sell more mortgages with texting
