Sharing customer wins can be a struggle sometimes.

Everyone’s busy, you know, helping customers. Taking time to curate a story, blast it internally, and ask everyone to take time out of their day to gape in amazement can feel a little rich for most customer success teams.

But here’s the thing: sharing customer wins is an essential ingredient to help drive customer-centric business decisions. And let’s be real here, it’s also to help all employees feel more connected to the company mission and feel like they are making an impact. There’s nothing worse for a smart employee than working on a totally irrelevant busywork project; people want to know they are making an impact.

So how do you do it? How do you effectively highlight customer stories? In this article we’re covering how it benefits every team and five sharing methods you can start today.

How sharing customer stories benefits every team

Product: A customer story provides direct feedback—in the customer’s voice—about the product and its functionality or ability to solve their problems. This is a great way for the Product team to see what’s driving value and what people wish the product could do.

‍Sales, Marketing, and CS: Great customer wins show the strength of the product and can be used to drive new marketing campaigns, leveraged in sales conversations, or used as examples for existing customers to try a new use case. A big customer win can also be leveraged to drive upsells or expansions with other customers by showing them the potential of the product.

‍HR and Operations: When HR and Ops can see which areas of the product are loved and valued (and which need some tender-loving-care), they can work with functional teams to project out talent and operations needs. 

‍Executive leadership: Visibility into what customers love or struggle with can help drive bigger strategic decisions. Further, getting direct access to the customer’s voice connects executives into both how their teams are performing and how customers are thinking, something that’s critical for board meetings and fundraising.

Beyond role-specific benefits, customer stories also make clear the impact you’re having, an incredible feeling that grounds the work everyone does.

Methods you can use to highlight customer stories

Depending on where your company is at, you may need to take a different approach to sharing customer wins internally. All options below achieve the end goal of getting wins shared, but some require a bit more work than others depending on your available resources.

1. Internal newsletter

Send a regular newsletter—typically bi-weekly or monthly—that explicitly highlights customer wins and stories. 

‍Time required: Minimal (1-2 hours per newsletter mailing to collect and format stories).

‍Resources required: Time (an employee to collect and format stories), a survey system (to get stories from customers), and an emailing system (some way to send blasts out to the company). 

This is the quickest and easiest to set up, but is the most difficult to automate because it requires consistent manual effort.

2. Make a dashboard in your customer success platform

Instead of asking customers to write all their own stories with a survey, leverage your customer success platform (CSP) to tag wins during your regular touch points with customers (or when you receive an email with them sharing something).

‍Time required: Very minimal (you’re already taking notes or reading the email, so the only additional work is to tag it as a “win”).

‍Resources required: A customer success platform with a centralized customer stories dashboard.

This process is manual, but much easier to maintain. You can also automate sharing through email or a central dashboard that every team can log in to see. 

3. Create a customer wins Slack channel

If your company uses Slack, create a special channel just for customer wins, case studies, and other stories. 

‍Time required: It depends. If doing it manually, a lot (copy-pasting the story each time from wherever you got it). If automating, then you don’t need to spend any time. 

‍Resources required: A Slack subscription and an employee to manage the stories. If you want to automate story sharing, you’ll also need a customer success platform with a Slack integration (PS—Catalyst has a Slack integration).

If you have a CSP with a Slack integration, set up the system to automatically pull the story into your Slack channel whenever it’s tagged as a win. This will save you a lot of time and ensure all wins get shared.

4. Make wins a permanent town hall or all-hands agenda item

If you prefer a lower-tech option, collect customer wins and share them at any regular town hall or all-hands meeting you have.

‍Time required: 1-2 hours of prep time to collect stories before each meeting.

‍Resources required: A central place where you can hold customer stories (e.g. a Google Doc or CSP).

We consider this a compound method. It’s great to have on top of ensuring stories are digitally archived and easy to access any time (like in a Slack channel or CSP).

5. For CS leaders: start all exec update meetings with a win story

This is an extra tip for all customer success leaders! When giving executive updates, begin with a quick customer win then dive into your analytics and full update. 

‍Time required: 1-2 hours of prep time for an employee to identify a relevant story that the CS leader can share.

‍Resources required: A central place where you can hold customer stories (e.g. a Google Doc or CSP).

Not only will this humanize your presentation a bit but it also grounds all executives back to thinking about the customer, not just the numbers. 

Keep winning by sharing wins

The cool thing about CS is you get to see customer wins (and complaints) every day. This is an enviable position—people want to know the impact their work is making. It has tangible personal benefit for all the wonderful employees in the business doing their best work and has tangible business benefit in the form of marketing fodder, increased sales and CS opportunities, product feedback, and even informing executive level strategic insight.

There are a lot of ways to get it done, but you can start immediately and grow from there. The key is to start sharing ASAP so you can build a business case for more resources if needed—or just keep getting all those karma points if not.