Steve Ellis : How to present customer references on web sites

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How to present customer references on web sites

Bill Lee - aka Mr Customer Reference Forum - asked me for guidance to pass on to a member seeking to rebuild their customer success stories web site. I passed back some quick views and opinions.

Thinking this might be of interest to others, or perhaps start a discussion, here are my comments back to Bill:

Finding case studies is a top reason for visiting corporate sites – so it needs a place/link on the home page (don’t settle for less).

Sites tend to come at it from two directions:

Sites that are effectively only aspiring to be a search capability on the front of a database of evidence and everything else is auto generated (so minimal web maintenance)

Sites that adopt an editorial standpoint and seek to engage the viewer and recommend content that is topical and interesting just like any other content provider

My preference is the latter because I believe customers want to read about other customers (and it goes without saying any web presence needs a successful search capability too). To support this, day-in-day out we see that any link/headline that features a customer name (ie Wells Fargo explains its new social media initiative) gets x3 the number of hits vs a generic headline without a customer name.

Good examples? Here’s a reference site we built recently for Microsoft's Innovative Schools Program.

Aside from being a bit more funky and consumer than usual, we:

Sliced and diced the video content so that users could group and view content across different case studies by subject matter, their role (teacher, parent, IT Manager), or simply watch a whole individual story.

Likewise the media player allows you to simply watch the soundbites that interest you.

There is also a BackPack feature that allows viewers to gather content they want to keep for later download (and collect email signups to do this).

The site also promotes other ‘call to action’ materials at the bottom of the page, which can be gathered up in the BackPack, so in a more commercial context, would become part of the lead generation process.