A while back, we wanted to share how some of Connhex’s customers were using it.

Easy, right? Not so much, if you want to do it properly. This post shares how we approached this challenge, plus a few examples of customer stories we wrote.

Ask for permission

Never disappoint any of your customers just to prove the world how great your product is.

Remember, they are the ones who have been trusting you¹ so far. Here’s our process:

• contact customers you want to feature and get their approval
• write the entire story yourself
• submit it for review a few weeks before publishing. Pro tip: don’t wait for approval here, just give them the option to bail out.

Be honest

One can smell lies from a mile: if you are going to write a customer story, it must be real.

Don’t have any customers yet? Depending on your product, you might:

• focus on features and acquire customers through other channels
• give it away for free to a limited set of people, in exchange for sharing their experience
• write case studies, in which you simply show its benefits in multiple sectors

Whatever you do, just don’t lie: sooner or later, it always backfires.

Don’t go overboard with the scope of your contribution: you never know what might be impressive to your next customer.

For example, we once extracted a few services from Connhex and told this story. Little did we know that other people were looking for ways to incrementally upgrade their existing systems, and would have reached out thanks to this use case.

Be specific

Customer stories serve two purposes:

• reassuring potential buyers they won’t be the first to test your product
• creating a narrative where future customers think “Hey, this looks exactly like my situation!”

Being specific is a general direction you want to keep in mind:

You don’t need to show how widely applicable your product is in a single customer story. You’ll do so by talking about multiple specific cases.

Customer stories are just a small section of your website: describe all the product’s bells and whistles in some other page!

3 examples of customer stories

Enough with the theory, let’s move on to examples: we’ll be using Connhex as a reference, for obvious reasons 😉.

Show off the tech

In this customer story, we wanted to stress how the company’s CTO chose Connhex after an in-depth technological scouting phase.

Connhex was preferred over better known alternatives solely based on its technical excellence. Being techies ourselves, this was a special source of pride - and this project holds a special place in our hearts to this day.

Highlight integration with current systems

Many potential customers might be scared of writing off their previous investments and start from scratch: this was, at least, the angle we took with another story.

We tried to highlight practical benefits. For example, the company in question:

• saved more than 70% of what was budgeted for evolving their existing solution
• migrated to Connhex without any disruption of service
• could count on us to develop additional functionalities

Partial disclosures

Sometimes you might consider a story to be particularly important², but the customer isn’t comfortable in publicly disclosing they’re using your product.

This is common, especially if they believe it gives an edge over competitors. Instead of wasting time trying to persuade them, just resort to a partial disclosure: don’t name the customer, only provide a vague description. At the same time, be as specific as possible about the project to avoid any suspicion around this being an actual customer.

For example, Connhex is currently used in the waste management sector: we strongly wanted to share this application, but couldn’t get clearance. You can find here a partial disclosure though!

What are your experiences with showcasing customer stories? Is there anything you feel we can improve? Just shoot us an email or a LinkedIn comment!