This job is a customer case study: you interview one happy customer, the AI turns the transcript into a draft, and the customer approves it before it goes on your website. It is a Workflow job that runs across a few sessions, about fifteen minutes to write the questions, a short call, one sitting to draft and check, and a wait for the customer's yes. This page covers the long-form version, one interview turned into one approved page. For spreading shorter proof, such as reviews and quotes, across a month of posts, our guide on sharing customer proof without sounding braggy carries the rest. The AI writes the questions and the draft. The customer supplies every fact, and the customer has the last word.
- Shape
- Workflow
- Sitting
- a few sessions
The shape: Workflow
A case study is a Workflow because it has four steps, and the work changes hands between each one.
The AI writes the interview questions. You run the interview. The AI drafts from the transcript. The customer approves the draft.
None of these steps can be skipped or merged. If the AI writes before the interview, it invents the story. If you publish before the approval, you have put words in a customer's mouth on your own website. A workflow is a set of steps with handoffs, and the handoffs here are the point: they are where the truth enters and where the permission is given.
What this means for you: you will not finish this in one sitting, and that is fine. Today you can write the questions and send the ask. The interview happens when the customer is free. The draft takes one more sitting. Then the page waits on someone else, which is the only part that is out of your hands.
What you give the AI
The AI needs different things at the two points where it works.
For the questions, give it:
- One sentence on the customer. Their kind of business or role, and what they bought from you. "A family dentist who hired us to redo their booking system" is enough.
- What they came to you for. The problem as you remember it from the first conversation.
- What you did. The work in plain words, the length of the project, and anything unusual about it.
- The reader you want this page to persuade. The kind of prospect who should finish the page thinking "that is me."
- The doubt that prospect usually has. The objection you hear on sales calls, such as cost, time, or whether it works for a business their size.
For the draft, give it:
- The full interview transcript. The raw text from your call recording, not your summary of it.
- The facts you can confirm from your own records. Start and finish dates, what was delivered, and any number the customer said that you can check.
- What the customer asked to leave out. Anything they said off the record, plus whether their name, company and photo may appear.
- Two or three pages from your own website. So the draft sounds like your business and not like a brochure.
Before pasting the transcript, read it once and remove anything the customer would not want shared with a third party, such as account numbers, health details or other people's names.
What comes back
The AI returns two things at two different times: a set of interview questions, and later a draft case study with every quote marked.
Paste this first, with your answers filled in:
You are helping a small business write a customer case study.
First, write the interview questions. Do not write the case study yet.
The customer: [one sentence on who they are and what they bought]
What they came to us for: [the problem as we remember it]
What we did: [the work, in plain words]
The reader this page is for: [the prospect we want to persuade]
The doubt that reader usually has: [the common objection]
Write 10 to 12 open questions for a 20-minute call.
Cover, in order: life before working with us, the moment they decided to look for help, why they chose us over other options, what working together was like, what changed afterward, and what they would tell someone like them.
Include one question that invites a doubt or a hard moment, because a page with no friction reads as an ad.
No yes-or-no questions. No leading questions that put words in their mouth.
Add two follow-up prompts we can use if an answer is short.After the interview, paste the second brief with the transcript:
Here is the transcript of our case study interview, and the facts we can confirm from our records.
Write a case study of 700 to 1,000 words for our website.
Rules:
- Use only facts that appear in the transcript or in our confirmed facts. If something is missing, write [ASK CUSTOMER] instead of guessing.
- Every direct quote must appear in the transcript word for word. If the transcript has timestamps, mark each quote with the approximate timestamp.
- You may trim a quote for length with an ellipsis. You may not change its words.
- Do not add numbers, percentages or results the customer did not say.
- Structure: a headline in the customer's own words, a two-sentence summary, then sections for the starting point, the decision, the work, and where they are now.
- Write in plain American English, in our voice, using "we" for our business.
- Leave out: [anything the customer asked to keep off the page]. Name only what the customer allowed: [name, company, photo, or none].
Transcript:
[paste]
Confirmed facts:
[paste]
Pages from our website, for our voice:
[paste]What you get back is a draft with a headline, a short summary, four sections, quotes tagged with timestamps where the transcript has them, and bracketed gaps where the AI needs an answer only the customer has. The gaps are useful. They become the questions in your approval email.
How to judge it
You can reject a bad draft in a minute. Look for these:
- A quote you cannot find. Search the transcript for a few words of each quote. If a quote is not there word for word, the AI wrote it. Delete it, and read every other quote with more suspicion.
- A number the customer never said. "Bookings rose 40 percent" when the customer said "we got a lot busier" is an invented result. Put back what they said.
- No [ASK CUSTOMER] gaps at all. A twenty-minute interview never covers everything. A draft with no gaps has probably filled them with guesses.
- A customer who sounds like a brochure. If every quote is polished praise, the AI has smoothed the customer's voice away. Real people hesitate, use their own words and mention a doubt.
- No hard moment. If the draft leaves out the doubt or the difficulty the customer described, it reads as an ad, and the reader stops trusting it.
- Your sales claims in their mouth. Any sentence that sounds like your pricing page and is attributed to the customer must go.
- Details they asked you to leave out. Check the draft against the list you gave the AI before anything else.
A good draft reads like a conversation you remember. When you read a quote, you should hear the customer saying it.
What stays with you
The AI writes questions and drafts. Four things stay with you, and they are the parts that make a case study worth reading.
The relationship is yours. A customer agrees to an interview because they trust you, not because the questions are good. Pick someone who is genuinely happy, ask them yourself, and make it easy to say no.
The interview is yours. The best material comes from the follow-up question you ask when the customer says something surprising. The AI can suggest follow-ups, but only you are on the call when the moment comes. Listen more than you talk, and let silences run a little longer than is comfortable.
The approval is yours to ask for and theirs to give. Send the full draft, with the [ASK CUSTOMER] gaps as plain questions, and say in writing exactly what will appear: their name, company, photo and quotes. Nothing goes on the page until they reply with a clear yes. Keep that reply. If their circumstances change later, take the page down when they ask.
The facts are yours to check. Dates, deliverables and any figure the customer mentioned should match your own records. If your industry has rules about testimonials or client confidentiality, such as health, legal or financial work, check what you may publish before you ask anyone for an interview.
Publishing is yours too. Put the approved page on your website, send the customer the link and a thank-you note, and offer them a copy they can share.
An editorial example
This is an invented business, used only to show the method.
Say you run a two-person bookkeeping practice. A client who runs a small landscaping company hired you a year ago after a messy tax season. You give the AI one line on the client, the problem as you remember it, the work you did, and the reader you want: other trade businesses who put off bookkeeping until April. The usual doubt from that reader is that they are too disorganized to hand their books to anyone.
The AI writes eleven questions. One asks what the client's books looked like the week before the first call. Another asks what almost stopped them from getting in touch.
On the call, the client says they were embarrassed to send a shoebox of receipts. You ask what made them send it anyway. That answer becomes the headline.
The draft comes back with three [ASK CUSTOMER] gaps, including the month they started and whether their company name can appear. One quote does not match the transcript, so you delete it. You send the draft with the three gaps as questions. The client fills two, asks to use only their first name, and says yes. The page goes live with their first name and the shoebox story.
Which format to choose
Not every customer story needs a full page. Choose by what the customer is willing to give and what your prospect needs to hear.
| If you have | Make | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A happy customer with time for a call and a story with a clear before and after | A long-form case study page | It answers the doubts a serious buyer has before calling |
| A short review or a one-line quote | A testimonial or a social post | A page built on one line reads as padded |
| A customer who will talk but not be named | An anonymized case study | The detail persuades even without a name, if they approve it |
| Several customers saying the same thing | A survey, then a short summary | The pattern is the proof, not one story |
When you have a short review rather than a full story, our note on reusing one review across your website, social and email covers the shorter route. To hear from many customers at once, the survey job is the better fit. When this one is done, the full list of DIY marketing jobs has the next one.
Of every job on this list, social media is the one that comes back every week, and Boomp is software that does that one for you. See ten posts made from your website, free
