How to Brief a Customer Case Study: Settle the Approvals Before the Interview
By Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, former CMO of Mozilla and BitTorrent ·
Write the case study brief before anyone books the customer interview, and make it answer two questions first: what the customer has agreed to let you publish, and which decision the finished story should help a prospect make. Then pick the format from the permission you actually hold. A named web story needs the logo, the quotes and every number signed off on the customer's side, while an anonymized story or a quote card can ship on much less, so the brief should name the customer's approver before the writer starts.
A customer success manager mentions that a 200-person freight brokerage in Columbus “loves us.” Marketing books an hour with their operations director, who is generous and specific and says onboarding a new carrier dropped from nine days to two. The writer turns it into a good draft in a week. Then the draft goes to the brokerage's communications team, and it sits there for seven weeks, and it comes back with the logo refused and the nine-to-two figure struck because nobody on their side had cleared it.
Every one of those seven weeks was decided before the interview started.
Most case study guides spend most of their length on story structure and interview questions. Both matter. Our view is that structure is the easy part, and that a case study brief is mostly a permissions document with a story attached, because what kills these pieces is usually a number the customer never agreed to share.
Settle permissions before the interview
Ask your champion at the customer a short, specific set of questions in writing, and get the answers before you spend their operations director's hour. Each one changes what the writer is allowed to produce.
- Can we use your name and logo? If the answer is no, you are writing an anonymized story, and you should know that now.
- Who on your side signs off, and how long does that usually take? The champion is rarely the approver. At a public company the approver is often someone in communications or legal whom nobody on your team has met, and the brief should carry that person's name and the turnaround the champion expects.
- Can we publish absolute numbers, or only percentages? Plenty of companies will clear “cut carrier onboarding time by 78%” and refuse “from nine days to two,” because the raw figures reveal how they operate.
- Can we name the tool you replaced? This is the line most likely to come back struck. Naming a former vendor creates a problem for the customer that has nothing to do with you.
Write the answers into the brief verbatim. A writer who knows the percentages are cleared and the raw numbers are not will ask the interview questions differently.
Case study formats compared
The format follows from the permission. Teams tend to decide they want a named web story and then go looking for a customer willing to be one, which is how stories end up stuck in approval for a quarter.
| Format | Best for | What the customer must approve | Length we brief for | Key trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Named web story | Prospects late in a deal who want proof from a company that looks like theirs | Logo, the person’s name and title, every number, every quote | 700 to 1,200 words | The strongest proof and the slowest sign-off. Plan for the customer’s comms or legal team to read every line. |
| Anonymized story | Customers whose policy forbids endorsing vendors | The numbers, plus a description that cannot identify them | 500 to 900 words | Approves in days. Persuades less, because a reader cannot check a company they cannot name. |
| One-page PDF | Account executives attaching proof to a follow-up email | Same as the web story, sometimes granted for private use only | One page, about 300 words | Never gets found in search. It lives in the sales team’s outbox. |
| Video testimonial | Homepages and late-stage deals where a real face carries weight | A release from the person on camera and the company’s sign-off | 60 to 120 seconds | Expensive to change. One stale number means an edit or a reshoot. |
| Quote and metric card | Pricing pages and sales decks | One sentence and one number | Under 40 words | The cheapest approval, with no room to explain how the result happened. |
Where each format fits (and where it does not)
Named web story. Worth the wait when the customer is recognizable to your buyers and the champion has already confirmed the approver. Skip it when the champion says “I'll have to check” about the logo. That sentence usually means no, delivered slowly.
Anonymized story. Underrated. A precise description (“a 200-person freight brokerage moving about 1,500 loads a week”) does most of the work a logo would, and it can be live in the time a named story spends waiting for its first round of comments. It loses when your buyer is the kind who checks references, because there is nobody to call.
One-page PDF. The format sales will actually use. Brief it alongside the web story from the same interview instead of as a separate project, since the approval is nearly identical.
Video. Only when someone on the customer side is comfortable on camera and the numbers are stable. If the metric is likely to improve next quarter, put it in the web story, where updating it costs an email.
Quote card. A by-product of every other format. Never brief one on its own; ask for the card's sentence and number in the same approval round as the longer piece.
The quote everyone asks for
Nobody in the history of software has been persuaded by “Acme has been a fantastic partner.”
What goes in a case study brief
The fields overlap with any content brief, with two that matter more here than anywhere else.
- The reader's decision. Most case study readers are prospects an account executive sent the link to, late in a deal, trying to decide whether a company like theirs got a result like the one they were promised. Say which objection the story should answer. “We're too small for this” and “migration will take months” produce very different stories from the same interview.
- The metric, with its baseline and its period. A percentage with no starting point means nothing. The brief should say “carrier onboarding time, measured from signed contract to first load, over the first full quarter after launch,” so the writer asks for exactly that and the customer approves exactly that.
- The cleared permissions, copied from the champion's answers above.
- The customer's approver, with a name and an expected turnaround.
- The before state, in the customer's words. Leave this blank until after the interview and fill it from the transcript.
- Where it will be used. Usually the web page plus a PDF for sales, and the PDF needs its own one-sentence summary at the top.
Interview about the decision to switch
A customer can describe your features less precisely than your own product page does, so time spent on them is mostly wasted. What only they know is what life looked like before, and what finally made them switch. Ask “What were you doing before, and what was the week you decided to stop?” and then wait. Most of what makes our guide to interviewing a subject matter expert useful applies here, including the five-second pause and the promise that they review every quote before it publishes. For a customer, that promise is also the approval round, so make it once and keep it.
Ask for the metric in the form the brief specified. If the operations director says “it's way faster now,” ask what a carrier onboarding took in March and what it takes today, and write down who on their team tracks it.
Does a case study need keyword research?
Usually not, and we would rather say so than pretend every page is a search page. A named customer story gets read because sales sends it by link, and its title should be the customer's name and result. For that piece, a blank document plus the interview transcript is a better starting point than any brief generator, ours included.
The exception is the industry page that a case study can anchor, something like “freight brokerage software” or “carrier onboarding for brokers.” Before deciding whether the story should be its own page or the proof section inside a broader one, paste that phrase into the ContentBrief.io brief generator. It reads the top 10 results and returns their headings and word counts, the People Also Ask questions, and a recommended length, in about 30 seconds and for free. If page one is full of vendor case studies, a standalone story can compete. If it is listicles and buyer's guides, brief the industry page instead (our guide to SERP analysis for a brief covers how to read it) and put the case study inside it, where the searcher will actually meet it.
After it publishes
Keep the approval email attached to the brief, along with the exact version the customer signed off. Six months later someone will want to update the headline number, and the only safe way to do that is to know precisely what was cleared. When a customer churns, take the story down or anonymize it within the week, and treat it as a content refresh with its own small brief. A case study for a former customer is a liability that prospects occasionally check on LinkedIn.
Before it goes live the first time, run it through the same pre-publish QA as any other page, with one extra check. Compare every number on the rendered page against the approval email, character by character, because the version a designer laid out is not always the version the customer read.