«Return to Blog List How to Cue Up Hard-Hitting Customer Quotes
There are times when, magically, customer quotes are exactly what you dreamed they would be. The featured customer delivers glowing, colorful, emotive comments that speak to the exact challenges that the audience is facing and provide the much-desired validation that the vendor wants in the case study.
Then there are all those other times, when the quotes are not the exact fodder you wanted for the perfect story that’s in your head.
Fortunately, you do, in fact, have some control over the quotes you collect from customers. The rest depends on the person you’re interviewing.
How do you cue up perfect quotes for your case study?
Here’s a best-practices playbook on getting effective quotes in customer case studies:
1. Interview the right people
This matters for so many reasons. Ideally, you want to quote someone in a business role/title similar to the audience for your case study so the reader automatically feels peer-to-peer respect.
If the CIO is your target audience, quote the CIO or similar executive-level person from your customer company. Always quote the highest-level person you can.
BUT what if the CIO can only speak to part of your story and a technology manager has more insight into usage and results? Then interview the manager but grab one quote from the CIO. You need both the detailed perspective and the credibility of the high-level quote.
2. Ask the right questions
To a certain extent, the personality of the person you interview drives the content of the comments. But you can ask questions that encourage your subjects to frame their responses in certain ways.
Ask open-ended questions that help them share details and emotion…
- What did your day look like before [the solution]?
- How has your job changed with [the solution]?
- Tell me about a time when you knew that things had changed for the better.
- How did it make you feel when you saw that incidents had decreased [or whatever benefit is relevant in your story]?
3. Get Challenge-Decision-Results Quotes
At a minimum, try for these three types of quotes:
- The Challenge – Something that describes the pain or challenge the customer experienced before
- The Decision – Why did the customer choose the solution?
- The Results – What is the number-one result the customer has experienced?
Feel free to quote more, but at least hit these points.
4. Don’t make up quotes
Made-up quotes sound, well, made-up. Actual customer comments are way more interesting and authentic.
But it’s a common practice to do this in marketing and PR. We don’t want to bug the customer and they just want something to approve. So at times we write case studies based on interviews with the internal account teams, rather than customers, and hence, have no customer quotes.
Try to get something directly from the customer, either from live interviews or by inserting a question directed at the customer right into the draft that you deliver. If you need to know why the customer chose the vendor, insert the question in the draft: “Why specifically did you choose to work with [vendor name]?”
5. Don’t over-edit
In customer case studies, we have the freedom to “doctor” customer quotes, but don’t give them such a full makeover that they are unrecognizable to the customer.
Customers appreciate it when we make them sound good but I’ve seen customers get a little uncomfortable when we market-ese the quotes too much.
What can you do?
- You might put two sentences together that were not said consecutively (most customers don’t notice.)
- You can eliminate repetitive or extra words
- You can add the vendor’s product/company name
Just don’t change the meaning of the quote.
6. Create quotes that stand alone
One of the awesome things about customer case studies is that it is content that’s approved by the customer. That means that, if you want to pull quotes out of the story for other marketing materials, you can do so.
But the quotes should still sound complete when they are seen on their own. They should also have the vendor’s name or product name in there so that the audience knows what the quote is referring to.
A quote that looks like this…
“No other database in the company provides that information…”
might be changed to…
“No other database in the company provides the information that [product name] does.”
Strive for as many of these tips as you can and you’ll do your part in capturing strong quotes. The rest is up to the customer!
What are your tips for better customer quotes?
