You’re working away, more or less enjoying your day. You have 17 tasks on your to-do list and a customer who won’t stop complaining (even though you solved their original problem four. emails. ago), but it’s not that bad.

Then the CEO casually sends you a Slack message: “How do our customers feel about our platform? A board member was curious. Can you send me a case study?”

Except you don’t have any stories handy. 

But it’s ok, you tell yourself. Deep breath. You got this.

You know the importance of a good customer story. Now you just have to find a relevant case study and send it over. ASAP.

So you furiously go through all your notes from recent QBRs, monthly syncs and adhoc calls. . You check the NPS comments and scour through your emails. And you ask all your colleagues for help in securing stories—stat—for the CEO.

You save the day, but honestly, you lost A LOT of time. In all this save-the-day-ness, though, there’s an opportunity: automate how you share customer success stories internally so everyone can see them. And when the CEO asks for examples, you can calmly pull up a list and share within minutes. 

We’re sharing two ways to automate story sharing, depending on what kind of setup time and resources you have at your disposal.

Why highlighting a good customer success story matters

The importance of a good customer success story cannot be overstated. It helps with everything: net revenue retention, expansions, upsells, product updates, and even CSM and sales team promotions.

‍For customer success as a whole: A big part of most companies’ overall customer success vision is, well, successful customers. When you highlight success stories, you add data points to that vision. When the case studies or stories are negative, you offer a turnaround opportunity or a way to learn and improve.

‍For CS team members: CSMs provide 1:1 engagement to their book of business, so sharing wins reflects positively on them as professionals. But sharing losses and negative events can also help CSMs in the long run because it gives them data points to work with—either things they can fix themselves or things they need to bring up with other internal teams.

‍For sales and marketing: When good stories come to light, they can be repurposed and shared out in service of getting more customers. This might mean, for example, the opportunity to reach out for video testimonials or engaging quotes to share on social media.

The goal of customer success is to help customers use your product and achieve value from it. But a huge part of that is showcasing the wins and learning experiences as they come.

Option 1: Low touch but quick and easy to set up

What it is: Sharing feedback surveys from customers internally, using automations and integrations to make the process easy.

‍Why it’s valuable: Sharing direct feedback means sharing the customer’s actual words. That’s a powerful reminder to everyone internally about who you’re serving and what they like. You also get to see the language they use, which can be helpful for marketing and sales efforts in the future.

‍Step-by-step guide:

1. Send customer success surveys on a regular basis. This might mean a net promoter score survey with a comment box or something more substantial.

2. Set up an integration between your survey software and your customer success platform. This ensures all data is centrally located and feedback is tied to each customer via their email.

3. Share survey results in your company’s chat app, email newsletter, or internal blasts. This can be automated (depending on which platforms you use) or done manually with limited effort.

This method of sharing is easy to set up and can often be done with free tools. It requires some additional manual effort to sustain, but it can return a lot of value quickly.

Option 2: High touch and human curated with automated distribution

What it is: This is the Catalyst method—the actual method our team uses to showcase success stories internally.

‍Why it’s valuable: We love this method because it takes advantage of the high touch customer experience we want to provide our customers, then leverages automations to ensure a great success story gets shared.

‍Step-by-step guide:

1. Create a notes template to document a success story within your customer success platform (not to be confused with your CRM). 

2. Write notes as usual. When you notice a story about the customer, write it in the template like you would anyway—share the core details of the story including the intended goal, action, and result.

3. Set up a Slack integration with your customer success platform. This will send all stories to a dedicated channel in Slack that anyone in the company can see.

Surveys can be impactful but often feel impersonal. We found this method allows for the relationship-building our CSMs want to focus on while using automation to ensure the whole company can see great examples of customer service and customer support.

Automation should make your life easier

As a CSM, your job is to make customers successful. That requires a lot of lift in the background: relationship building, admin, being an accountability buddy, reminding them of things, etc. So when you think about automating things internally, it should be to make your life easier.

Sharing customer stories is critical for showing the value of customer success and for bringing the voice of the customer into your entire organization. From that perspective, automating how you share stories is both useful for you and a highly valuable action to your company. But that doesn’t mean you should spend all day and night setting it up and managing it—find a tool that fits into your workflow and turns your amazing notes into customer stories.

‍… and if you want to learn more about a tool that can help you automate how you share customer stories with ease, check out Catalyst.