How Customer Success Stories Harness Human Psychology to Win Clients and Unite Your Organization

There are some scientists who think all of the human psychology boils down to stories. Others focus on memory — on the way we learn to turn our experiences into stories, crafting memories and forming our own unique sense of self.

The simple fact is that stories are uniquely, overwhelmingly human. We remember facts better if they occur in stories. We believe stories more than arguments. We’re drawn to stories, we enjoy spending time on them, and we can’t help but care about them.

So, naturally, stories make for excellent marketing.

In a straight comparison, stories are more persuasive than factual arguments. Narrative ads lead to more positive brand impressions than non-narrative ones, even if the storytelling is visual. And storytelling as professional marketing has been around since 1895 when John Deere started publishing The Furrow magazine to establish himself as an expert…and a reliable purveyor of excellent tractors.

But narratives in marketing can take many different forms, from cut-and-dried case studies to the big-picture, omni-media process of building brand storytelling.

I’m in the business of customer success and for my colleagues and me, there’s one form of storytelling that matters more than any other: customer success stories.

Customer Success Stories

A customer success story is a detailed account, from the perspective of a specific current (or sometimes past) client, laying out the whole narrative arc of involvement with your company. It starts before you come into the picture: there’s a firm, and they’ve got a problem they can’t solve. They isolate the need, they look for someone to fix it. They find you.

And you, armed with fearsome technical expertise and deeply empathetic understanding, swoop in to save the day. Maybe you show them a new way to frame the problem. Maybe you introduce them to tools they’d never considered or even heard of. Maybe you reorganize a key workflow or build bridges they weren’t looking at. There are lots of gritty details, maybe there are mistakes or false starts until a setback leads to a new solution.

From a storytelling perspective, the basic formula is pretty simple. Start with a service you need to showcase. Match that with a relatable customer. Add in a specific, concrete problem and a situation that’ll feel familiar to other clients — both current and future. Show, step by step, how the service you offer overcame the problem.

Why They Work

That’s the idea. As compared to a straight pitch, or even an alternative form of narrative advertising, customer success stories work for a couple of reasons.

First, they’re relatable. Prospects don’t just get information about what you do, they see a detailed description of how well your service fits the capabilities, needs, and resources of a company that’s in a situation just like theirs. That context is extremely powerful, giving the reader a sense of what it’s actually like to work with you — and showing off the power of your solutions when they’re pitted against a real-world problem. That’s also useful to other current clients, who get to see new sides of your services and capabilities.

Second, thanks to their wealth of vivid, specific, accurate details, customer success stories are actionable. They show clients where to start: what steps to take first, how to think about their problem in a way that highlights the value you offer.

Third, customer success stories are probably the most credible form of advertising. Because you’re going to spend a huge amount of time interviewing, surveying, and following up with customers as you build the story, its authenticity is going to be obvious. That kind of honesty — warts and all, including failures, mistakes, and missteps — is something you can’t fake, and couldn’t write without the client’s help. That’s naturally going to win you a lot of trusts.

There’s also a sort of reverse benefit from the story-writing process: your current customers will go through a detailed reflection on just how much you’ve helped them, deepening customer loyalty and buy-in. It can also be a huge win for the customer, both externally as their success is spotlighted and internally as they get a solid report they can bring to their own leadership.

Here’s some hard-hitting validation. The MIT Sloan Management Review recently published an overview of three large, high-quality studies, analyzing thousands of interviews before and after people saw customer success stories. There were modest gains in trust and self-brand connection…and a thirty-two percent increase in purchasing consideration.

Get Your Stories Out There

There are a few take-home points here. The big one, obviously, is that customer success stories are one of the most powerful marketing tools available to any company. They bring in new clients, they build loyalty and improve retention, and they reinforce your team’s confidence in what they can do.

Another is that the main resource you need is one you’ve got right there: it’s your current customers.

A third take-home point is to get your stories out there. Once they’re written, you’ve got to make sure prospects see them, which is best done by crafting a mix of visual, verbal, and video stories and then incentivizing their organic spread through social.

Fourth, make sure the story is being read internally, too. And that as many people as possible get to contribute. Crafting good customer success stories has incredible power to get people on the same page across teams, across departments, and across organizations.

Now get out there, and tell your story.