Runs customer interviews engineered to produce usable testimonials and case-study raw material - a question sequence that elicits before/after specifics and real numbers, a permission and approval workflow, quote-editing ethics (tighten but never fabricate), and a soundbite extraction procedure. Use when a user says "get a testimonial from this customer", "interview our customer for a case study", "our testimonials are all vague praise, help me get better ones", "draft interview questions for a customer success story", or "can I edit this customer quote". Do NOT use for turning the raw material into the finished case study - use case-study-builder instead - or for research interviews with subject-matter experts where the goal is learning, not marketing material - use expert-interview instead.
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name: testimonial-capture-interview
description: Runs customer interviews engineered to produce usable testimonials and case-study raw material - a question sequence that elicits before/after specifics and real numbers, a permission and approval workflow, quote-editing ethics (tighten but never fabricate), and a soundbite extraction procedure. Use when a user says "get a testimonial from this customer", "interview our customer for a case study", "our testimonials are all vague praise, help me get better ones", "draft interview questions for a customer success story", or "can I edit this customer quote". Do NOT use for turning the raw material into the finished case study - use case-study-builder instead - or for research interviews with subject-matter experts where the goal is learning, not marketing material - use expert-interview instead.
---
# Testimonial Capture Interview
A testimonial that says "great product, great team!" persuades no one, and it is not the customer's fault - it is the interviewer's, because vague questions produce vague praise. The costly mistake this skill prevents is burning a willing customer's only interview slot on questions that yield nothing quotable, then either publishing mush or ghost-writing a quote the customer never said. A well-sequenced interview reliably extracts the before/after story with numbers, and the ethics workflow makes every published word both true and approved.
## Operating procedure
The sequence matters most inside the interview itself (Step 3): specifics come before feelings because memory works that way - a customer asked "how do you feel about the product" gives adjectives, but a customer walked through their old workflow first gives numbers, and the feelings that follow attach to those numbers.
### Step 1: Select and brief the customer
Pick customers with a measurable outcome and at least 90 days of usage - earlier than that, the "after" hasn't stabilized and the numbers won't survive scrutiny. Send a short brief when scheduling: the purpose (a story about their results, in their words), the time ask (30 minutes), the control they keep (nothing publishes without their written approval of the exact words), and a request to have any relevant numbers handy. The approval promise up front measurably improves both acceptance and candor.
### Step 2: Prepare the specifics you already know
Before the call, pull what the account already shows - usage data, support history, the original sales notes on why they bought. Interviewing from zero wastes half the slot on facts you had; interviewing from data lets you ask "your team went from 40 to 300 workflows in Q2 - what happened there?", which is where good soundbites come from.
### Step 3: Run the question sequence
Record the call (with consent, stated at the start - recording consent is separate from publication consent and both are required). Then run five phases in order: