Are you feeling the pressure to deliver more customer stories without any increase in your team’s resources? That was the challenge I faced when I started at Vimeo.
The demand for authentic customer proof is skyrocketing – from sales and marketing to executive teams – but our capacity to capture and produce these stories often lags behind.
In this article, you’ll discover how I transformed our approach to customer storytelling by strategically integrating AI across the entire workflow.
I’ll share the specific, tactical ways I use AI to streamline the process, uncover crucial metrics, and scale our customer stories without sacrificing the authenticity that makes them so powerful.
Why customer stories matter more than ever
At its heart, the decision to buy is about emotional connection and trust, not just features and price. As marketers, we need to understand that prospects don’t want to hear from just brands – they inherently trust their peers more.
Hearing directly from other customers who’ve been in their shoes is infinitely more powerful than any message we could craft on our own.
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The growing resource challenge
The reality is that the demand for customer stories is exploding across the organization. Our CEO at Vimeo, for example, loves to start every meeting with a customer story. Yet, the resources we have to capture and produce these compelling narratives aren’t growing at the same pace.
The big takeaway for all customer marketers is this: our job is to find ways to scale customer storytelling without losing the crucial element of authenticity.
When I first joined Vimeo, I immediately saw an opportunity to use AI to address this gap. While the stories we produced were visually stunning with strong narratives, they often lacked the measurable outcomes and metrics that truly bring them to life for a prospective buyer. It’s those metrics, paired with the customer’s initial challenge, that show why customer stories are essential to the buyer journey.
Integrating AI into the customer story workflow
I like to think about the customer storytelling workflow in three main stages, and AI brings tremendous value to each one.
The biggest benefit we’ve seen is saving significant time while simultaneously keeping quality high.
Finding stories
AI is incredibly powerful at surfacing insights that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Think about all the places potential customer stories can be identified:
- Surveys
- Sales and support calls
- Community threads
- Social media
AI can scan across all these touch points to spot patterns, identify unexpected story angles, and even proactively identify advocates. This allows us to move beyond relying only on the most obvious wins and instead uncover fresh, authentic stories that truly resonate.
