Case Study Template

What is a Customer Case Study?

A customer case study tells one story: what the customer was struggling with, what was done, and what measurably changed. It matters because buyers discount vendor claims and credit customer experience. A case study with a named organisation, a described starting position and a number with its basis is evidence. One built on adjectives and an anonymous logo is marketing copy with a different layout, and buyers read it as such.

Business-to-business marketing teams, agencies, consultancies, software companies, equipment manufacturers, universities describing research impact and charities describing programme outcomes all produce them. They are used in sales conversations, on websites, in tender responses where evaluators score evidence of comparable work, in award entries, and internally to show a delivery team what good looks like. The most useful ones are commissioned deliberately after a project where something specific improved, rather than assembled later from whatever anyone can still remember.

Publishing a customer's name is constrained on several fronts. Many master services agreements and public sector contracts prohibit naming a client or using their marks without written consent, so the contract is the first thing to check. Results claims are advertising and must be substantiated — under the FTC's rules in the United States, the CAP code and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act in the UK, ASCI guidance in India and the Australian Consumer Law. Naming individuals and using their photographs engages GDPR, the DPDP Act or the local equivalent. Public bodies may also need their own communications sign-off.

A case study is not a reference. Procurement panels want a named person who will take a call and answer unscripted questions, which is a bigger ask and should be sought separately. It does not promise the same result to the next buyer, and presenting an outlier as typical creates a substantiation problem as well as a disappointed customer later. It is not a technical implementation record — the detail an engineer needs belongs in documentation — and it does not override any confidentiality clause you have already signed.

What to put in a Customer Case Study

These are the details this template asks for. Anything left blank is marked in red on the preview so you can see what is still missing.

How to write a Customer Case Study

1. Get approval before you interview

   Confirm at the outset who at the customer must approve publication — often communications or legal rather than your day-to-day contact — what may be named, whether figures can be used, and roughly how long approval takes. Doing this first prevents the common outcome: a finished piece, weeks of internal review, and a refusal that leaves you with an anonymous case study nobody believes.

2. Open with the result, not the background

   Put the outcome in the first two lines, with the organisation named and the change stated. ‘A 400-bed hospital cut its agency staffing spend by a fifth in one year after moving rostering in-house’ earns the next paragraph. Three paragraphs about the customer's founding history do not. Readers who are scanning half a dozen case studies decide on the first sentence which one to actually read.

3. Describe the before state in their words

   Quote the customer on what the problem cost them: the hours, the missed deadlines, the manual workaround, the complaint volume. A recognisable starting position is what lets a prospect place themselves in the story, and it is the section most often skipped in favour of jumping to the solution. Ask directly what they would have said about the situation the week before work started.

4. Show what was done and the constraints

   Give the sequence, the timescale and the real conditions — the legacy system that had to keep running, the eight-week window, the team of two. Case studies that describe a frictionless implementation are not believed by anyone who has run one. Naming a difficulty and how it was handled is the part a technical evaluator reads closely, and it is what distinguishes a real project from a brochure.

5. Publish numbers with their basis

   Every figure needs a baseline, a period and a source. ‘Invoice approval fell from nine days to three over the six months after go-live, measured in the customer's finance system’ can be defended. ‘3x faster’ cannot, because nobody knows faster than what. Have the customer confirm each number in writing, and note anything else that changed during the period which might also explain the result.

Common mistakes

• Writing the whole case study before asking whether it can be published, which risks weeks of review or a refusal after the work is already done.
• Filling the piece with adjectives and no figures, which leaves a buyer with nothing to take to their own approver.
• Quoting a percentage with no baseline or time period, which is unsubstantiated as an advertising claim and unpersuasive to anyone numerate.
• Making the study about your methodology rather than the customer's problem, so the reader never sees themselves in it.
• Publishing a named individual's quote without checking they still hold the role and have consented, which can leave you quoting someone who has left and never agreed.

Frequently asked questions

This page explains general practice and is not legal advice. Requirements differ between countries and, in some cases, between states — check what applies where the document will be used.

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