What Customer Testimonials Can Teach Designers of Learning Experiences

OnStar is a GM product that is kind of like a digital Swiss Army knife for your vehicle: it can notify emergency services, summon roadside assistance, provide remote diagnostics through an app, find your ride should it get stolen, and enable you to report potential dangers in real time.

Blah. Blah. And blah.

Features.

Features don’t sell something. Benefits do.

And benefits are often best sold with a story.

source: https://www.onstar.com/stories/easy-to-be-a-good-samaritan

Obviously these OnStar testimonials are one big ole' sales pitch. But they still work. These stories pull us in. Entice us to keep reading. And tap into the secret sauce that makes a learning experience effective: motivation.

Motivation that is intrinsic has three key characteristics:

1. you feel more competent;

2. you see the impact of your decisions (autonomy);

3. you experience relatedness.

But what makes the OnStar testimonials really effective is the fact they reflect lived experience. They are authentic. “No sales technique works better than the truth,” adds marketer Dan Lok, author INFLUENCE!: 47 Forbidden Psychological Tactics You Can Use To Motivate, Influence and Persuade Your Prospect (Quick Turn Marketing International, Ltd.; 2015).

He could just as well be talking about having to take some kind of corporate training or required course.

Motivation is motivation, and marketers excel at tapping into it – and keeping ‘em engaged. And while a scenario for a training needn’t be 100% from real life, it should closely mirror it. Not the details, per se, but the emotions involved. Then the story can engage the learner rather than coming across as exaggerated or worse – irrelevant.

To avoid turning people off, Lok advises crafting these kinds of case histories so they not too long, which is boring, but neither are they too short (you won’t be able to get the main point across).

The sweet spot: 300 and 400 words.

And stories just make everything sweeter.