A customer case study should take an afternoon. It usually takes three weeks, because the interview is unstructured, the first draft reads like a press release, and nobody can agree on which result to lead with. These five prompts remove each of those bottlenecks.
What’s on this page
- An interview guide that produces usable answers, not pleasantries.
- A transcript-mining prompt that finds the story buried in the recording.
- A before-and-after structure that keeps the customer as the hero.
- A quote polish that makes quotes readable without faking them.
- A sales snippet so the study actually gets used after publication.
The prompts
1. Customer Interview Guide
Write an interview guide for a case study with [customer] about [product]. Ask about the situation before they bought, what they evaluated instead, what the first month looked like, and what changed afterwards. Phrase every question so it cannot be answered with yes or no, and put the two most important questions first.What it does: Produces questions that generate sentences you can quote, rather than a checklist of confirmations.
How to use: Replace [customer] and [product]. Send the guide ahead of time — people give better answers when they have seen the questions.
2. Transcript Mining
Here is an interview transcript: [paste transcript]. Extract: the problem in the customer's own words, the alternatives they considered, the specific moment things changed, any concrete outcome they mentioned, and their best three quotable lines. Quote them exactly — do not clean up the grammar yet.What it does: Does the tedious part of case study work — finding the story inside forty minutes of talk.
How to use: Paste the raw transcript. Ask for exact quotes at this stage so you can judge what is worth polishing.
3. Before and After Structure
Using these notes: [paste the extracted material], outline a case study in four sections: the situation, the problem with what they were doing before, what we did together, and the outcome. Keep the customer as the main character and the product as the tool. Write the outcome section last and make it the shortest.What it does: Builds the narrative so the customer earns the result, which reads as credible rather than promotional.
How to use: Do not let the “what we did” section become the longest one. If it is, the study has turned into a brochure.
4. Quote Polish
Here are three customer quotes: [paste quotes]. Tighten them for readability by removing filler words and false starts, keeping the exact meaning and the speaker's voice. Do not make them more formal and do not add anything. Show me the before and after side by side.What it does: Makes spoken sentences printable while keeping them honest.
How to use: Send the before-and-after to the customer for approval. Showing exactly what changed makes approval much faster.
5. Sales Snippet
From this finished case study: [paste case study], produce three shorter assets — a 60-word summary for a landing page, a two-sentence version for a cold email, and one line suitable for a slide. Keep the same facts and do not introduce new claims.What it does: Turns one long asset into the three formats a sales team will actually use.
How to use: Give these to sales, not the full document. Nobody reads the full document mid-cycle.
How to adapt these prompts
- For an internal case study, replace “customer” with “team” and ask prompt 1 about process and handoffs instead of purchase decisions.
- If the customer cannot share numbers, add “describe the change qualitatively and do not imply a figure” to prompt 3.
- For anonymised studies, add “use [Company] and [Industry] placeholders” to prompt 4 before you send anything for approval.
FAQ
How long should a case study be?
Long enough to prove the change happened, short enough to read in one sitting. Four short sections beat a ten-page document that nobody finishes.
Who should write the first draft?
Whoever ran the interview. Handing a raw transcript to someone who was not in the room is how the story loses its specifics.
What if the customer will not approve a quote?
Publish with attributed facts instead of quotes, or use an anonymised version. A case study with a named company and no quotes still works; invented quotes never do.
Keep going
- Browse the Marketing prompt library
- 5 ChatGPT prompts for campaign briefs
- 6 ChatGPT prompts for cold emails
More free prompts for marketing are waiting in the GuPrompt library.