From Prep to Polish – Best Practices for Filming Customer Case Studies

One of the best ways to showcase your company wares, communicate your message and demonstrate proof of concept is through customer case studies and testimonials.  Having a third party endorse and support your company mission and products speaks volumes, but it isn’t always easy to get your interviewee to convey the information needed to make the case study compelling and leave viewers with a call to action.  At uStudio, we love using video for our case studies because no medium is better than video to convey the sincerity and authenticity that a powerful customer case study demands.

Here are some of our tips for filming a case study from prep to polish.

Before the shoot:

• Interview colleagues that know the account such as a sales rep, account manager, or customer support person. This can give you insight into areas to highlight or sore spots to avoid during an interview.
• Break the ice with the customer. Schedule a brief 15-min phone consult to introduce yourself and build rapport. This will help you form an initial impression of how they might sound on camera.
• Send the customer a list of discussion topics and schedule a follow-up call.
• Pre-interview your customer to understand their use case. Most case studies are designed to emphasize how a problem was solved or goal was achieved over a specified period of time. Probe the customer to understand the extent of their pain and how your company saved the day or the extent of their wishes and desires and how your company made their dreams come true.
• Identify missing data points and follow up with the customer to procure hard data in advance of the shoot. E.g. If a customer tells you that your company has saved him a lot of time, find out how much. What was the before and after?
• Share an outline of the story with your director and create a shot list. Prioritize your shot list into Must Have and Nice to Have set-ups.
• Define a b-roll shot list. Now double it. There is no such thing as too much b-roll. Having a healthy amount of b-roll will help in editing.
• Get all the necessary permissions. Are you going to be filming at the customer’s location? In a public space? Make sure you have secured all necessary approvals or permits for both your on-camera interviewees and your locations.

During the shoot:

• Shoot in a comfortable environment to put your customer at ease. Sometimes comfort can be as simple as swapping out a chair or tilting a light to a slightly different angle.
• Help your interviewee relax by playing a few word games before the cameras roll.
• Ask open-ended questions during the interview that require thoughtful responses. e.g. ‘Where are you from?’ is not nearly as powerful as ‘Tell me about the place where you grew up.’
• Try asking the same question a few different ways to illicit different sound bites. e.g. Why did you choose My Company to work with on this project? What are the top 3 adjectives that come to mind when you think of My Company? What are the main ways in which My Company is different than competitors?
• Keep the conversation focused on benefits and results.
• Ask your customer to give specific numbers or data when possible.
• Smile.
• Schedule your b-roll shots for after the interview. That way, if new b-roll ideas come to you during the interview, you can opportunistically grab them afterwards.

After the shoot:

• Have the full interviews transcribed. Review the transcriptions and point out any critical sound bites to your editor before they begin cutting.
• Have your editor do a rough cut.
• Don’t neglect the bookends. Ask to see a few different options for the opening and closing. Sometimes how you frame the story can help the other pieces fall more naturally into place.
• Choose your music wisely. It should support, not compete with, your story. If the first thing someone notices about your video is the music, you’ve probably done something wrong.
• Use all that b-roll to cover awkward cuts.
• Here are some of our favorite case studies. We’d love to see your examples of great video case studies as well.