7 Mistakes Companies Make with Customer Testimonials
As we ramp up to our release of the first Storytelligent course: Crafting an Authentic Customer Testimonial, I wanted to touch on the 7 most common mistakes I see made in regards to customer testimonials so you know to avoid them.
These are issues I repeatedly run across through my work that
Prevents testimonials from being made
Slows down production
Dooms the success of your testimonials from the beginning
While customer testimonials are extremely valuable, we need to make sure we're approaching them properly, so we get the most value out of our, and our client's, efforts as possible.
You’ll Learn:
The benefits to your current client relationships
Why it’s your responsibility to get a great quote from your customers
How to get the most value out of your testimonials
The ability to gather deep customer insight
Who you should select as your story subjects
How to preserve authenticity in your testimonials
Key Terms
Customer Testimonial
A statement or endorsement provided by a customer or client about their positive experience with a product, service, or brand. It is a trust building tool that provides a form of social proof and adds credibility to the brand’s promise. Unlike case studies, testimonials are more emotional in nature, focusing more on the customer’s personal experience, touching on their journey, and expressing the overall value they received from the product/service.Customer Insight
The understanding and knowledge gained about customers through qualitative research, as opposed to quantitative data sources. While quantitative data can show us a map of a customer’s actions and list of demographics, insight helps us understand customers' preferences, behaviors, needs, motivations, and expectations. Customer insights are crucial for developing effective marketing strategies, enhancing products or services, and delivering personalized experiences that align with customer desires.
And we are TWO WEEKS AWAY from the release of my first course: How to Craft an Authentic Customer Testimonial. This course will train you on the foundation of brand storytelling, and teach you my Emmy-winning formula.
Transcript
Hey, what's going on, guys?
All right, So last episode, episode 35, I revealed to you that I am putting together the first ever storytelling giant course crafting an authentic customer testimonial. You've really started to hear about it a lot now, and I am just really excited about this because I know it's going to be an extremely valuable course for you. Customer testimonials are kind of like the marketing gift that keeps on giving giving.
If you approach it from a storytelling perspective. Okay. It is a just a very effective way of gathering deep customer insight and also crafting a marketing tool that is very valuable for your company because it provides that much needed social proof. In this episode, I want to touch on the seven common mistakes that I see being made in customer testimonials.
So when companies go about crafting a customer testimonial or putting one together, these are the seven mistakes that I often see made. And so I want to bring this to you so you can hopefully avoid these mistakes.
Mistake number one, it's pretty obvious it's not doing a customer testimonial in the first place. I know it's kind of like a cheap one.
Okay. I'm not even sure if I'll actually count this, but I'm serious though. That is a huge mistake. It's a huge mistake of not actually getting into a regular habit of producing customer testimonials, but just not even going out and getting them made is a very big mistake. If you're working for a company or running a company that's doing great work out there, you want other people to know about the great work that you're doing.
And yes, word of mouth is extremely powerful, but why not take control a little bit of the word of mouth, not just hope to rely directly on your customers to become advocates, but if you've structured your service well enough and if you've structured your relationships well enough, they want to actively become advocates. Because if you were sweeping them off their feet and treating them super well, they're going to want to go tell other people about that.
That's what the customer testimonial allows you to do, allows you to facilitate that action, but put it at scale instead of just waiting for them to have a situation where they might bring you up in conversation. You get to take control of this and ensure that it's actually happening. But doing them is very powerful. It's it's also powerful
because a lot of people don't realize this, but it's powerful from a client relationship, a customer relationship maintenance perspective.
When you are the customer testimonial basically announces publicly, kind of solidifies the fact that this person or this organization is your customer, that they use your services. That means that they are declaring publicly that they stand by you in a kind of weird way. It's kind of like publicly coming out and saying like, Hey, yeah, we're dating, we're official, we're exclusive.
Okay? That actually just that act alone provides it strengthens that individual customer relationship. So so putting your customer testimonials into a process like building a building a regular rhythm of creating these things and just starting to create them actually strengthens your own customer relationships.
Since not not only does it leverage social proof, it, it helps to streamline recommendations because you've got somebody out there now at scale recommending you.
It also strengthens the relationship between your organization and the customer that you have selected. It's pretty they're pretty powerful. They're pretty awesome. Okay. Now number two, the second mistake that I see people make is and I just touched on that with number one, so we might just combine these into one and two just so it's not so stupid that I said a mistake is not doing them.
But seriously, that is a huge mistake, is not creating a regular process for doing them. But what I mean by that is, is the customer testimonial isn't a mainstay of your content marketing strategy. I see that as a huge miss because yeah, it's it's great to have them and it and I'm not saying like it's it's bad to just do one offs because any time you do a customer testimonial it's a very valuable tool that you're building for yourself and and it's it's just a great thing to have.
But why not just make it part of your regular content strategy? Get into a rhythm of constantly telling your customer stories. Because if you're out there doing great work, if you're a successful company, then you've got a lot of clients that you you are constantly serving, right? And then over time you're kind of rotating through these clients. Now, obviously, whether or not it becomes part of your content strategy really depends on how big of an organization you have.
If you've got a small business and you tend to stick with the same ten clients for, you know, five, ten years, it makes it a little difficult to constantly go back and just do another customer testimonial. It could be done, though. I'm just saying it could be done because now you could focus it on a project to project basis.
And after you do a project you just rolling yet another testimonial. It might get annoying to your clients after a while, but I'm just saying it could be done. But if you're inside of a large organization, you've got hundreds of of customers and you tend to get in waves and waves of these customers. You know, over the years, maybe you've got a maybe they're rotating out.
You kind of notice that you've got new batches of customers every five years or so. Get in a habit of making producing customer testimonials stories a part of your content strategy. Because also if you're in that situation, you might want fresh faces constantly so that in that way you're not relying on a customer testimonial that, say, five years old, ten years old of a customer that's potentially in a bad spot now and not even a customer a customer anymore.
So getting in the habit of doing them regularly is very beneficial. Plus, when you get in the habit of doing it regularly, now you've you constantly have this database of insight that you get to use. It's like I said at the very opening of this, doing customer testimonial stories is a very effective way of constantly deepening your own customer insight because it's kind of like a like I said, that's the gift that keeps on giving.
As you approach this from a storytelling perspective, you have to dig into problems and you have to dig into their journey and you have to dig into their driving desires, which is everything you're digging into anyways, as you're building out personas and customer profiles. So this sort of switches us into my my next my next mistake as well.
So let me just try to finish this thought. So as you're building up the customer testimonial, customer test, customer testimonial, customer testimonial, make sure that you're not just leaving this information simply in its story format. Create a table or create a log or some sort of Excel spreadsheet where you are keeping track of your information for your different customer personas.
It's going to really help you build out that character profile and strengthen your understanding of your customers character profile.
The third mistake I see people make and by the way, this isn't in any sort of order, okay?
This just happens to be on the order of the list that I have. But the third mistake I see people make when they are doing customer testimonials is that they don't go about it from the perspective of crafting a customer testimonials story. They go about it from the perspective of getting a customer testimonial quote.
there's a real big problem with this.
And the the biggest problem is you're losing out on an ability to mine some deep customer insight. Again, I just I just kind of touched on this, but the point of approaching this from a storytelling perspective is that you get to touch the entire customer journey. You get to to hear about their experience throughout the the entire customer journey.
Granted, it depends on what like what stretch of time your story is taking place across, right? If this is a customer testimonial where it's how they met your company and how your company provided a solution for them after they met your company, then yes, you're covering that entire customer journey. But if it's a customer testimonial where it's more just focused on a specific project where you help them out, you aren't still get it.
You're not exactly getting that for customer journey understanding, but you do still understand how you are meeting people, solving their pains, solving their problems and bringing delight to them. Okay?
And it's only when you approach these from a storytelling perspective that you're mindful of trying to hit all of those beats and that you're mindful of, okay, I have this main character.
This character is my customer, and therefore I have to create a character profile from them so I can tell the best story possible. Okay. And therefore, you're going to want to make sure that you are appropriately getting an insight into their driving desire, that you're appropriately getting insight into their status quo. Where were they before they started to feel a sense to before they started to really feel the problem that they had?
What caused them to step out to try to solve this problem? How did that problem affect them? What did that problem look like externally? How did that affect them internally? How did that bring them into an identity crisis? Right. What was their thought process as they were going through this problem? What was that moment when they realized they couldn't do this by themselves and they had to reach out for help?
How did you arrive in order to help them? How did they perceive that entire experience? You get what I'm saying as you're telling the story. Stories
aren't just on the surface. They're not just data points. On the surface, As we tell stories, it challenges us. The whole act of crafting a story challenges us to go beneath the surface, go where data doesn't usually allow us to see and see inside of the mind of the customer and see inside of their their emotions and dig into their hopes and their dreams and help us map that to the solution and to the experience that our organization provided.
And by telling a story, you end up getting a lot of information because you've
you've crossed the entire journey with them. You've covered that entire journey. You're not just going to get one quote out of that. You're going to get several quotes that you can use. You get an abundance of quotes. So don't just go for the quote, go for the story.
The other reason why I feel like you should go for the story and not for the quote is that,
again, it goes back to control. You're more in control of that process because when you are trying to get a story from somebody, I can't trust somebody to type up their story for me and send it to me. First off, no one is going to do that.
No reasonable person is going to sit down, especially if they're a business person, right? They're not going to sit down and type out their their story and their engagement with me. First off, they might not even understand how to how to even frame that in order to get this story, I have to be either on the phone with them or in person with them.
So that way I can properly draw that story out. I have to talk to them. Now, the benefit of this is I get to talk to them and I get to draw the story out. It actually doesn't require we require much effort on their part to do it. However, when you ask somebody to provide you with a quote, oftentimes the question is, hey, do you mind providing a testimonial quote about your experience?
Just that task alone is going to have somebody sitting around for maybe 15 to 30 minutes trying to figure out like, well, what is what is a good quote? How do I even frame this? What do I do? And again, it's all up to them. And they might not focus on things that you found particularly important within the engagement that you actually want to make sure it gets passed on to other people.
Okay. They they might be rushed for time and just type something out and send it to you, at least when you're interviewing somebody, you have the ability to actively listen, respond to answers they're giving you to dig for more insight. So if they're not necessarily, you know, following your lead and an answering the question that with the with in describing the situation in a way that you feel like needs to be described, you can just ask them to do that and they will.
So that is the hugest benefit of not going for the don't make the mistake of only going for the quote
because you're putting a burden on your on your customer and you're releasing control to them and making it their responsibility to take responsibility for that for yourself and just get them on the phone or get in front of them and ask them a few questions.
Anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. And then you're going to have more than enough information for not only a great story, deep customer insight, but you'll get a plenty, plenty of quotes to use.
All right, So the fourth mistake I see people make is only focusing on the unicorns. Now, I touched on this mistake in a prior video. I think it was the tour guide strategy. I apologize. I forget the the actual episode number, but I'll put it up here so you can follow that link and check it out.
But essentially, it's this sense of only thinking that the the unicorn customer stories, the ones that have this like magical outcome, this like one out of a million outcome with your company that those are only the stories worth telling. Now I don't want to deter you away from only telling what am I trying to say here? I don't want to deter you from telling the unicorn stories.
Because you know what? If you if you help a company make $20 million, it's definitely something to brag about. That's pretty awesome. However, is that result a consistent result when a company does business with your company, What are the the consistent results that you're able to provide? What can you guarantee and that is what I would recommend that you really focus on with your customer stories.
Otherwise you're kind of risking up promise. What am I trying to say? You're risking doing false advertising, you're communicating false promises. If you're only searching for these these just unicorn customer stories.
Okay. Because you also want to attract your ideal customers. And therefore, what you really want to focus on is who do we best serve? Who do we like working with the best?
Who are we best equipped to help out? And that is who you should be focusing on over and over and over again and and just constantly putting that information out. So that way you're communicating. You're just broadcasting it out to to the world, basically. These are our ideal customers. These are who we do our best work with. This is who we want to continue to work with and grow with.
And that is really the message that you want to be putting out. And then very
similarly to what's the chance that the the unicorn company is your ideal customer? What if they actually aren't your ideal customer, but you're so focused on just these results that you're not really thinking in terms of who do we actually do our best work with?
Okay, So it might put you in in a bad position because you're broadcasting out, Hey, we want to work with these people. You would then attract more of those people, but that's actually not who you really want to serve, right? The other thing, too, is if you are trying to break into a specific target area or target market and you've done a successful project with somebody and you know those are going to be our ideal customers in this new market, then definitely do customer testimonials about them for the same reason because you want to communicate, Hey, we want to work with people like this
Okay. So number five is not doing a video story. Okay? I feel like this is a really big mistake because it kind of goes back to the reason why you would want to do a story versus a quote, because if you actually do a story, you get more material to work with.
It's the same reason why you would want to approach your customer testimonials from a video first strategy for producing them, then say a written strategy.
Granted, a lot of this has to do with time and it has to do with budget. Okay, so I do. I understand that. However, you can actually craft a pretty effective video based customer testimonial by interviewing your customers via Zoom that takes the same amount of preparation for a phone call, maybe just a little bit more, but it's very equivalent.
It's not as as taxing on them as, say, sending out your video team or hiring a videographer and sending them out to record these things because it can be done and it can. And I feel like we're so used to seeing people on Zoom now that the audience watching a webcam story, they are much more welcoming with that nowadays, especially since post-COVID I'm able to get away with with a perceived higher quality value of work.
When I do, when I integrate Zoom call footage into my videos, people don't. There used to be that it was this immediate perceived like, Oh, this is trashy, this is very low quality, but if you can edit it correctly, sustain the attention, arrange your, arrange your story in an engaging way, people immediately forgive it, not even to
the point where they forgive it anymore.
They just accept that it is just normal. So they're used to seeing people on Zoom. So even if you have to record it on Zoom, that's still better than only getting a written testimonial. So don't source your testimonials only on email. Get them on a Zoom call and interview them through Zoom. Because at least when you have the video, you also have the audio files.
And if you have the audio you have the written. Okay, Doing
it from a video gives you much more ability to repurpose that content in a bunch of different mediums across many different platforms. A video interview can easily become a written testimonial interview. A video interview can easily become part of a podcast, but you can also turn that video interview into an ad, both a video ad, or even a radio ad.
You can chunk that out into several different video clips. You can do an entire video story about it. It gives you much more flexibility in how you want to actually use that footage because you did it from video first. So at the very least,
do recorded Zoom interviews with your customer contact or your customer themselves, because that's going to give you the most flexibility going forward to actually repurpose that content.
And you're going to thank me later. You're welcome in advance.
The last two are kind of connected because the last two mistakes that I see commonly made with customer testimonials are about being authentic and and being story minded, being storytelling giant.
Okay, Now the first number six. Number six is that
it's a huge mistake when you actually don't dig into the problem, when you're just it's almost as if you would fall into this mistake if you're just focused on getting that gleaming testimonial quote where they're talking about how awesome your company is,
because the perspective there is that we just want to hear about the great time that they had with us, the great benefit that we brought to them and and how we helped them.
But in order to really get that that good customer insight and as we learned from episode 35, in order to create a need inside of future customers as they hear about the value that we do to make them want that and to make other people understand why we're necessary in the marketplace, we need to dig into the problems that our customers are facing and we need to have a clear understanding of what that crisis moment was that caused them to hire us, seek us out, do business with us, or buy our product.
Okay, that stuff is necessary. So and a lot of times too, is this comes with practice and you really do have to kind of force yourself to do this, because I feel like in common polite conversation, we just naturally train ourselves to just talk about the fun stuff. And especially in a business context, we rarely want to actively dig into talking about problems.
We kind of just like shy away from that area in a way because it's a problem area, right? Digging into the problem will require us to change what we're doing and actually like update our systems or something, you know? But we have to be bold enough to dig and
and bold enough to follow up. I remember I was interviewing these two founders of a of a startup, a biotech startup, back when I was in North Carolina.
And we dug into the dug into the problem and they kind of gave us like just a just an answer or whatever. And I was like, okay, that's good enough. But the my client was was in the interview with us, and he was a very talented, seasoned storyteller. He had been in in PR and communications out in in DC for a lot of his career, and he jumped in and started digging deeper into the problem.
We assumed that we had touched it. We assumed that we had checked on that box, but he was like a pit bull and really pressured them to. No, no, no, no. Don't give us that surface. Like, how did that feel? What did that feel like? Tell us more about this. And that really stayed with me. I kind of was like, all right, first off, not going to make that mistake again for the client, but just to hear how he took control over that and and didn't let them go and boldly dug into the problem.
Because then as we're hearing their answers and realizing how vital this information is for us to craft an engaging story, it was definitely a a a career shift moment for me, and it was really valuable. So don't let up. Push yourself to dig into the problem, to really uncover that insight.
And then the last mistake, which might actually be the most critical mistake that you could possibly make when doing customer testimonial stories is forcing it to be about your company pushing it too much and injecting your company too much into the story. This is a huge problem. It's a huge problem for a lot of reasons. First off, it's completely unnecessary.
You don't have to inject your company into the story. The story is about how a customer, how your company helped a customer. Okay? Like your company is already kind of like a supporting character in this story. And it's very obvious it's about your company because where are they going to possibly come into contact with this story? It's going to be on your social media platforms, it's going to be on your media channels or it's going to be on your website.
It's going to be on a spot that is controlled by you, where within that given context, totally obvious that you it's about your company, that it's promoting your company. The bad side of this. There's way too many bad things than good things here. The bad thing here is that it immediately feels inauthentic. People immediately feel that you're putting too much emphasis about your company here and therefore overshadowing the customer experience.
All right. It breaks them out of their enjoyable watching experience because they feel like that you're trying to assert too much. It it's almost like in a social way of you dominating the conversation of somebody telling telling a story about you and that person, and you just keep interjecting into that story. It's weird, right? And it's it doesn't doesn't need there's no need for you to do that.
And basically, it just feels now instead of like this authentic story that I actually want to get lost in and follow along, it feels too forced and it feels like I'm watching propaganda and it feels like I'm I'm watching your company celebrate yourself rather than watching a customer celebrate you. And so it doesn't land, right? And therefore never do that.
Only only allow your company to be in the story. It's natural for your company to be in the story. There's no need to to try to like, impose your presence because it is naturally a story about your company anyways. Okay. You always have to keep in mind that a customer testimonials story, it's the customer's story. It's not your organization's story.
It's a story about the customer, because that's the expectation that the audience has when they watch the story. And so the more you respect that expectation and the more you respect and honor your customer and truly do your effort to make sure that you are telling their story, your audience is going to notice that they're going to notice that care.
They're going to notice that attentiveness. They're going to see how you treat your customers and how you value the customer relationship demonstrated through how you actually structure the story of your customer testimonials.
All right, guys. That's it. Hope that was helpful. Just remember to avoid those mistakes and faux pause as you begin to craft your customer testimonials, stories.
And if you would like some really awesome instruction on how to craft an authentic customer testimonial story, then I would love for you to take my first ever storytelling agent course, crafting an authentic customer testimonial. If you're interested in that, visit Bryce McNabb Ecom Backslash Course. Submit your email there so that way you can get updated as this course is released, which I believe will be in two weeks from today.
This course is going to walk you through how to shape a customer testimonial that customers actually want to watch and not just want to watch will be compelled to share with their friends. You're going to learn how to source customer testimonials. Set up a system where people are submitting them regularly to you.
How to contact your customers to get them on board, how to shape your story ahead of time. Organize your questions list, run the interview, and then pull everything together in an engaging story. That act that you can use across multiple different platforms. Seriously, it's going to be amazing. Not only am I going to be providing the course, but we're also if you don't feel like you want to sit through all the instruction, you can just purchase the guide book itself.
And the guide packet itself is going to include all of the testimony, the excuse me, all of the story frameworks, all of the email templates and the content strategy inside of that. So the course, the opening price for the course is going to be $197. But if you don't want to deal with the course, you want the opening price for the content packet, then that's only going to be 1997, right?
$19.97. All right. So you got your choice. You can either do the do the whole course and get the get the guided instruction from me or skip it by the packet. Still going to be very valuable to you. All right. If you want help crafting your brand story, reach out to me at Bryce McNabb dot com. I would love to sit down with you and really help you map out that marketplace story and then map out your authentic purpose story.
So that way you can really build a brand that immediately communicates the value that you provide and it forms a genuine relationship with your audience. And if you'd like to take your storytelling skills or even your team's storytelling skills to the next level, I do group training as well as one on one coaching. Again, reach out to me at Bryce McNabb dot com and I'll see you guys in the next episode.
Take care.