Creating Customer Case Studies for Your Business

Case studies are a great way to highlight how much your customers enjoy your business or product. These articles are meant to give the reader an understanding of how you’ve solved their problem and made a positive change. These case studies are great for social media or just a helpful sales tool for you to show similar customers how you managed to make a positive change. As consumers, we’re often curious about how a service/product can help us or prove to be useful. This is where you should indirectly brag about your company.

How to get Participation:
Generally these should be done via email or over phone and it’s always helpful to get the customer to supply some of their own pictures. Many customers are slow or apprehensive about committing to these interviews. Generally if you offer them something like a starbucks, amazon, or Visa giftcard you’ll find that they’re far more interested in helping you produce a great case study.

Writing your case study:
You want to organize your case study in a narrative form. Meaning, you want to tell the customers story. People tend to relate more to stories than anything else especially when the situation described is very similar to their own. You should have three sections:

Before we found your service/product:
-Company info
-Issues prior to using your product/service
-Pain points

After we started using your product/service:
-What changes were made
-How easy it was to make those changes
-What benefits they’ve noticed

Future outlook:
-What do you expect to see in the future thanks to your service/product
-How this will allow you to save time/money/headaches in the future
-Ask for a short one-line testimonial – “If it weren’t for this product I wouldn’t know what I’d be doing next year.”

What to ask?
The questions should always be open ended and you should encourage the customer to give as much detail as possible. Keep in mind that you can pull testimonials out of these case studies, so if you word your questions correctly, you should see a few gold nuggets that you can pull out to use in your write up. The following is our Case Study Questions Cheat Sheet, that should help you ask the important questions to get great answers for your case study write up.

About the job:
Name of the company?
Where are they located?
How long have they been in business?
What do they do?
What does this company specialize in?
Who are their customers?
How many people work there?
Can you think of any other interesting pieces of information that people might want to know?

Life before the service/product:
What caught your attention about _____ company?
How did you start doing business with _______ company?
What had your projects been like before you used  _____ company?
Why did you choose ____ company?
Was there a turning point or a moment that you can remember that made you choose us?
What was the biggest different between us and our competitors?
What aspects of our service appealed to you the most?
Why was now the time to use our services?
What were the main considerations you took into account prior to choosing us?

Life after the service/product:
How have things improved after you used the service?
What parts of the project came out better than expected?
Would you use _____ company again? Why or Why not?
How have things improved for your business (or life) since our work was completed?
Are you able to do anything now that couldn’t before?
If you could say one nice thing about our company, what would it be?
Is there anything we could do better in the future?
What was your favorite part of this entire project?
What would it take for you to recommend us to your friends/family/colleagues?

Quantitative Data:
Improvement Can you quantify any of the changes that have been made?
Are you saving or making more money resulting from of our service?
What was the total cost, time, and scale of the project?
How many people did it take to complete this project?
How many jobs were created as a result of this project?

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