Customer success stories - are you asking the right questions?
One way to ensure your business communications are most effective is to highlight how your company helps customers to solve their problems.
If you can tell the story of how you were able to support another business - to reduce costs, increase sales or improve productivity - you'll have an effective and compelling tool you can use to explain your service to prospective customers.
You can share these examples in newsletters, on your blog, or as standalone case studies to demonstrate what it is you do best.
However, the challenge can come in describing exactly how you helped. In larger organisations, for example, the team that worked on a project may be proud of its work, but unable to explain clearly how the client benefited. They may talk excitedly about the project being a 'first' - but a first for your company, rather than your client.
So, to get to the heart of a customer story and show your business in the best light, it's crucial to ask the right questions.
For instance:
- What was the original problem that the client wanted to solve?
- Why did the client choose us instead of our competitors?
- What one thing did we deliver for the client that they could not have found elsewhere?
- What would the client have had to do if they had not used our solution/product/service?
- Are there any figures available that show how we helped the client - an increase in customer numbers; the number of complaints our technology helped to resolve; the dollars we helped our client to save?
- Has our solution/product/service enabled the client to do anything that they weren’t able to do before?
By asking such questions, you'll focus your team's attention on how you really help clients, and ensure you have a story you can share widely to demonstrate that support.
And as you develop more of these stories, you can put in place a process to capture this information for every client project. Before long, you'll have a collection of success stories you'll be itching to share.