Leveraging customer testimonials: navigating legal and ethical considerations

That's a great question.

I think the features are so new that a lot of legal teams don't even know they exist yet. I think a few use cases from orgs that have tried it would go a long way toward building trust with our legal team.

I feel like it’s one of those things that the platform would help you identify and then you would ask the CSM (or account owner) to make sure account health is good before asking the person for permission (the customer legal team too).

have you used a tool that does this? Or are you just sharing how you'd approach it?

My approach, , as I see it like any other testimonial — just a different source.

Yeah, unfortunately, legal sees it pretty differently.

What’s their perspective?

That a customer being recorded on a Gong call and having a quote pulled later could be a liability if the customer didn't know that the transcript or recording could be used for that purpose.

any thoughts on this?

with Laudable, they have a productized system for you to request approval from the customer to use their quote in marketing materials. It's not a given that call snippets or quotes can be used by marketing because the customer consented to having the call recorded.

Yea great question - it is definitely a bit wild west right now (curious to hear 's feedback as I believe they were the first to launch this feature). Our initial approach at UserEvidence was just to defer to the UE user (ie customer marketer) to use their judgement and be appropriately conservative/smart in publishing quotes or case studies from Gong transcripts, including giving the user the option/control to keep it blinded/anonymous, which definitely reduces the exposure of course relative to named.

But we're going towards more of an (optional) approval workflow as well (e.g "publishing" that testimonial would then kick off an approval email w/"hey can we use this A) not at all, B) blinded/anonymously, C) named" -- especially since a lot of our customers are larger enterprise and in security vertical so more conservative/buttoned up and would need an additional sign off on that (b/c the 4 second Gong annoucement at the top of the call definitely doesn't address this use-case)

Right, I explained the approval process for customers but legal has a concern that even the act of going to a customer and surfacing a quote from a Gong call to ask for approval could have unintended consequences and put off customers because they may feel like they didn't consent to have these calls reviewed for marketing purposes.

mmm interesting i see, yea that's a fair question.

Just to be clear, <i>I </i>understand the approval process, but it's not me I have to convince, it's the lawyers. Especially when we're dealing with security/privacy sensitive customers in developers/engineers.

What about a work around? You could say "Hello Customer, I heard from your CSM that you had an interesting story about XYZ, could you tell me more about it?"

Otherwise, it might be a good idea to message Gong and ask, I'm sure the question has come up before and since we haven't been able to help you, maybe you could share with us

Hey all!

Yep, we’ve got a lot of functionality tied to sourcing outcome metrics, quotes, customer stories, advocates, and AI testimonials from call recordings.

terms of positioning with legal:

1. Standard is that no content can be used without customers permission *this is key
2. Laudable also will never reach out or send comms to any customers directly - this is always in your hands as the user.
3. via Gong/Chorus/etc - the customer is already required to opt-in to being recorded, so they know that’s happening and the company may use the recordings for a range of purposes
4. We also have clear recommendations on ways to make asks to the customers and what to ask for in which scenarios (e.g. text only / story vs the actual video) - happy to share more!
5. We’ve never seen an instance of a customer being upset or even opting out, likely bc of the disclosure on recording (#2 above)
6. In terms of the data security itself, we have strong security policies and standards including SOC2 Type 2 compliance.

Our team relies on UserEvidence for testimonials/quotes. When these are published on social, we reference "data verified by UserEvidence". Given UserEvidence is a third party, I have found that it's a means to featuring testimonials without requiring standard legal approvals. As part of the UserEvidence survey, we ask permission to reference the customer by name. I have yet to run into a situation where this is disputed.

I've used UserEvidence previously as well, and I've liked it for that reason. It becomes a little trickier when we're using existing recordings from Gong and other sources when they haven't expressly given permission for the recording to be used that way. Even though we would definitely ask for permission prior to publishing the testimonial.

this response is late, but I'm now facing the same challenge. Thinking about adding Laudable or UserEvidence as a Gong integration for customer testimonial hunting, and getting some headwind from Legal. It seems that an upfront notice/consent process with a Gong call recording at all should be step 1 in these workflows. A phrase about marketing use (with express permission if public) could be part of that up front consent.

^^

TY for coming back to share and for hosting the call yesterday, you did a great job. Hosting isn't always as easy as it looks and you sounded so cheerful. 😄