[WORKFLOW] How we collect customer stories & testimonials using Typeform

[WORKFLOW] How we collect customer stories & testimonials using Typeform

Hey there,

 

I'm James, and I'm part of the Content team within Customer Success at Typeform. It's great to meet you :) 

 

I want to share some tips about how we use Typeform to collect customer success stories for our blog – and how we then automate the management of these stories within Typeform's wider content team. 
 

You may be collecting and publishing customer stories for your own business already. If not, you're missing out. We've found them great for:
 

  • Social proof to attract new customers.

  • Engaging existing customers by showing them new ways they can get more value.

  • Educating existing customers on advanced features and the benefits of using these.

 

Personally, what I love about writing these case studies is finding out the amazing stuff our customers are doing - and to hear about the difference our product is making to their business. You can see a ton of examples in the Inspiration section of our blog.

 

So, what do we do and how do we do it?

 

1. Finding customers

 

There are a bunch of ways we identify customers who are a potential fit for a customer story, including:

 

  • An internal Slack channel for typeform employees to share interesting use cases they've seen of Typeform in the wild.

  • Research on social media and communities where we look for people who mention their use of Typeform. 

  • We have embedded our customer story questionnaire on our blog so that customers can submit their own stories through there.

 

Our internal #inspiration channel. We're forever amazed at the ways people are using Typeform


 

The content team has a checklist which we use to assess whether a use case is a good fit for a story. Criteria we look at are things like:
 

  • Interestingness of use case

  • Story 

  • Results/business impact

  • Typeform design

  • Brand relevance

 

2. Capturing their story


Once we've identified a customer we're interested in featuring we get in touch with them and – assuming they're up for it – share our Case Study Questionnaire typeform with them. Note that we embed this same typeform as a popup at the end of our blog articles to collect submissions out in the wild, too.

The typeform includes an embedded videoask allowing the respondent to reply to the questions via audio or video if they prefer. To see how it all works, take a look at this overview of what's inside:

 

 

3. Working with the responses

 

Once the customer has submitted their story, we have a bunch of automations set up to make our lives easier when managing the responses:

 

Slack alerts 

 

Whenever a customer completes the case study submission form, our content team is alerted in a Slack channel. The message pipes in the responses to the questions at a glance so the team can quickly see the quality of the submission and respond to the customer accordingly. 


Here's our Content Experience Manager, @Nasia  with a quick demo:

 

 

For more on setting up the Slack integration, head to our Help Center.

 

Storing stories in Airtable 

 

Internally, we centralise our customer story content inventory in Airtable. This makes it easy for the team to tag, filter and view content based on certain criteria. For example, if we have a marketing campaign coming up on doing lead generation, we can easily find potential customers to feature. Likewise, if we want to run an educational Webinar on Logic Jumps we can filter for case studies of customers who are using Logic and reach out and see if they'd like to participate as a guest.

 

Here's a vid showing how the Airtable integration works. If you want more info on how to set up the Airtable integration, check out this Help Center article.

 

 

Creating automatic drafts in Google Docs 

 

Probably my favourite integration is the Zap that takes the customer's response to the typeform questionnaire and turns it into an article automatically in Google Docs. We can then quickly turn this document into a blog post, email content, landing page content, etc. Very cool.

 

Nasia was the brains behind this one so I'll let her explain how it works:

 

 

So, after all this do you want to submit your own Typeform success story? Now you know all the work that's gone into setting up the process it's the least you can do, right? Feel free to go fill in the typeform. And don't worry, we'll know straight away if you have or not 👀

 

This is great content @james - seriously. 

I can see doing this same approach for my own business .. it looks simple and easy enough to implement. 

 

cheers

 

des

This is a fantastic post, @james! Thanks.

Aw thanks guys. @john.desborough yeah it's pretty straightforward. I forgot to mention in the post that we have a template of the intake form here so you could fiddle around with that as a starting point. Let us know if you end up doing it, would love to see how it works out for you...

@James - sincere thanks for the link to the intake form!… (*crosses two tasks off the to do list*)

will check out and let you know how it goes (probably starting with it next week.. (

 

des

This is very useful. Thanks for sharing the insight, @James! 

Wow, really cracker. 

 

Was hoping to get some information on: 

 

  1. With the case study questionnaire - what nuances do you’ll see as a company when a customer has offered to leave a testimonial via Typeform as against to VideoAsk? For example, do you’ll see a better quality testimonial when one leaves a testimonial via Typeform as against to VideoAsk?
  2. When working with responses in Slack - what are some of the criteria that Typeform use to separate a good story from an average story...without having to read the entire text? We use LEN (character count) in Google Sheets once we’ve downloaded the information from Typeform to Google Sheets. The reason we use LEN, is because that’s common to the best and worst customers - they say the MOST. 
  3. Would love to know what you’ll were using before AIRTABLE and what AIRTABLE offers that the previous app did not.  
  4. When creating automatic drafts in Google Docs...and I’m guessing this is where the story comes to life, are you’ll able to share how the story is crafted? 

Many thanks and would really hope - Typeform and VideoAsk would get together and create a course on ASKING AWESOMELY. 

 

Aware that there are a few courses out there - but with the information, that’s been learnt since 2015 and being associated with Typeform and now VideoAsk, I know it would be a cracker. 

 

Thanking you so much.

 

Aftab 

What an inspiring post, @James! Thanks for all the tips, I’ll for sure be sharing this with our Marketing team :blush:

I’d also like to say that I love how meta it is that you use a typeform to ask people about how they use Typeform :nerd: Makes me chuckle a bit. 

Wow, really cracker. 

 

Was hoping to get some information on: 

 

  1. With the case study questionnaire - what nuances do you’ll see as a company when a customer has offered to leave a testimonial via Typeform as against to VideoAsk? For example, do you’ll see a better quality testimonial when one leaves a testimonial via Typeform as against to VideoAsk?
  2. When working with responses in Slack - what are some of the criteria that Typeform use to separate a good story from an average story...without having to read the entire text? We use LEN (character count) in Google Sheets once we’ve downloaded the information from Typeform to Google Sheets. The reason we use LEN, is because that’s common to the best and worst customers - they say the MOST. 
  3. Would love to know what you’ll were using before AIRTABLE and what AIRTABLE offers that the previous app did not.  
  4. When creating automatic drafts in Google Docs...and I’m guessing this is where the story comes to life, are you’ll able to share how the story is crafted? 

Many thanks and would really hope - Typeform and VideoAsk would get together and create a course on ASKING AWESOMELY. 

 

Aware that there are a few courses out there - but with the information, that’s been learnt since 2015 and being associated with Typeform and now VideoAsk, I know it would be a cracker. 

 

Thanking you so much.

 

Aftab 


Glad you found this interesting @aftab :smiley:

Here we go with the answers to your questions (I hope it makes sense but happy to clarify anything)

 

1.With the case study questionnaire - what nuances do you’ll see as a company when a customer has offered to leave a testimonial via Typeform as against to VideoAsk? For example, do you’ll see a better quality testimonial when one leaves a testimonial via Typeform as against to VideoAsk?

 

Definitely the videoask elicits deeper, more in-depth responses. The person is more likely to elaborate on things, whereas with the typeform the answers are shorter and very straight to the point.

There are pros and cons to this. In the case of the videoasks, I've noticed that sometimes folks stray away from the question easily and veer off topic a little (for example, talking more generally about their business and less about the use case we asked them about). This can give you some interesting perspective and great fodder for follow-up questions but it means you risk not having your original questions answered precisely.

I honestly think both tools are great for testimonial collection but ultimately I guess it depends what you want to do with this content. Video testimonials can be very powerful for marketing purposes (there's a great talk about it here) and are ideal for landing pages/social media content. I also think you get a lot out of a videoask for research for longer-form content like blog articles because people do tend to go into extra depth.

However, if you're looking to build more "frameworked", templated content like Q&As/case studies, etc. then I think a typeform is a better option because you get more specific (if shorter) answers to the questions. 


 

2. When working with responses in Slack - what are some of the criteria that Typeform use to separate a good story from an average story...without having to read the entire text? We use LEN (character count) in Google Sheets once we’ve downloaded the information from Typeform to Google Sheets. The reason we use LEN, is because that’s common to the best and worst customers - they say the MOST. 
 

We have a checklist of "interestingness criteria" as I mentioned in the post. We're building a new system to be able to apply these checks in a more systematic way. @Nasia  is creating a new version of our case study intake typeform that applies scores to answers based on what the person answers to the multiple choice questions. It kicks out a total score based on what extent the story hits our criteria  – e.g. within a certain industry verticals, certain use case types, certain personas, does it mention certain features of Typeform, etc. Here’s the new form. And here’s an example of how the scoring works:

 


 

3. Would love to know what you’ll were using before AIRTABLE and what AIRTABLE offers that the previous app did not.  
 

We were using Google Sheets before. What I love about Airtable is that it makes it super simple to tag and group customer case studies (e.g. by company type, use case, features of Typeform they mention, integrations they use, etc.). This makes it really easy for our content or marketing teams to find someone who fits a certain profile and then use their testimonial or follow up for an article about a specific thing.

 

It's not that Google Sheets can't do this, it's just Airtable makes it easier (and you can create preset "views" for stakeholders so they can apply their own filtering/grouping without messing with your default view.

4. When creating automatic drafts in Google Docs...and I’m guessing this is where the story comes to life, are you’ll able to share how the story is crafted? 
 

Ultimately we would love to get to the stage where we're just copying and pasting from the GDoc to our CMS (or firing it with a Zap) - but we're not quite there yet :P

We've experimented with a few ways of moving the story from the shared Google Doc into a published piece. In the past we've done the following (in order of level of effort):
 

* directly using the Q&A, just adding an intro. Example.

* built an interactive-typeform based story using the answers they provided. Example.

* copied and pasted the answers into another doc, picking the best quotes then structuring a narrative around this. Example.
 

We're looking at new ways of being able to leverage the responses at scale so I'll come back and report on them once we have some results from our experiments. If you have any suggestions based on what's worked for you, we'd love to hear them!



Many thanks and would really hope - Typeform and VideoAsk would get together and create a course on ASKING AWESOMELY. 


☝️ Super awesome idea Aftab  🙌🙌  We are planning to run more educational webinar-type content on best practices for making surveys and forms that deliver great insights – and I agree it would be great to do something that touches on using the two products effectively in tandem.

Watch this space (specifically this space) for details of workshops and webinars coming soon!!!

What an inspiring post, @James! Thanks for all the tips, I’ll for sure be sharing this with our Marketing team :blush:

I’d also like to say that I love how meta it is that you use a typeform to ask people about how they use Typeform :nerd: Makes me chuckle a bit. 



Thanks @Michaela :hugging:  Yeah, it is definitely meta. We always follow that old business expression about “eating your dog food”. I think it’s a nice way to prove your belief in our own product. Plus, it’s a lot nicer than eating “s******monkey food” 🙊 Although I guess in real life I would prefer to eat monkey food since that’s fruit, so I’m not really sure where I’m going with this analogy...

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