“The difference is our people.” Is it?

“Our people make the difference.” “We put customers at the heart of everything we do.” “Our award-winning service sets us apart.”

Put those statements on a leasing or rental company’s website and they will sound familiar. Put them on a competitor’s website and they will probably fit just as well. Remove the logos and how confidently could a prospective customer tell the businesses apart?

The people may be excellent, the customer commitment sincere and the awards deserved. But when several providers make the same claims, those claims do little to explain why someone should choose one over another.

A difference needs to be something a customer can recognise in their experience. Your communications need to show what that looks like.

Good people doing what differently?

If your people make the difference, explain what they do that matters to the customer.

Do they recognise a problem in a vehicle specification before it becomes an operational issue? Ask questions that change the proposed solution? Take responsibility across departments when a customer would otherwise have to coordinate everything themselves?

Those behaviours give the claim substance. They also help a prospective customer understand how your expertise could benefit their own business.

“An experienced account manager” describes a resource. A customer explaining how that person understood a difficult requirement, challenged the initial brief and helped make the solution work demonstrates the value of the experience.

The more specific you can be about the contribution, the less you need to rely on broad statements about the quality of your people.

Customer focus should be visible in a decision

Putting the customer at the heart of the business sounds positive. It is also easy to say without explaining how it affects anything.

Where does that commitment become visible? Perhaps in the way a service is designed, the flexibility available when circumstances change or the response when the standard process does not meet an operational need.

It may be most revealing when there is a difficult decision to make. How does the provider respond when the customer challenges its recommendation? What happens when an issue crosses departmental boundaries? How does it handle a requirement it cannot fulfil?

A customer story can show how those situations were approached and what the customer experienced as a result. That is much more informative than another declaration of commitment.

Awards need context too

Awards can provide useful recognition, but a collection of badges leaves the prospective customer to work out their relevance.

What was recognised? What evidence supported the award? How does the achievement translate into a better experience for someone running a fleet?

If an award recognises a service improvement, tell the story of what changed and why it mattered. If it celebrates innovation, show the problem that innovation helped a customer solve. Give the audience enough detail to understand the achievement rather than expecting the accolade to do all the work.

The award can reinforce the evidence. It cannot explain the customer benefit on its own.

Let the customer demonstrate the difference

Real customer stories create a way to show what a provider contributes in practice. They begin with the customer’s objective, explore the challenge and explain how the leasing or rental company helped.

Imagine a fleet needing to mobilise vehicles for a new contract within a demanding timescale. “We delivered a flexible solution” tells the reader very little. The useful story lies in the details: what made the requirement difficult, how the provider responded and what its support enabled the customer to achieve.

Perhaps someone identified a suitable alternative when the original specification was unavailable. Perhaps the mobilisation required coordination across several locations. Perhaps the plan changed as the customer’s requirements became clearer.

Whatever happened, the story should establish it accurately. The customer’s account gives the audience something concrete to assess, including whether that experience is relevant to their own operation.

Find the evidence before writing the claim

It is tempting to decide what makes the business different and then ask customers to endorse it. That can produce case studies shaped around the provider’s preferred language, with the customer supplying a few supportive quotes.

A more useful approach starts by exploring the experience. What did the customer value? What surprised them? Where did the provider make a contribution they would have struggled to secure elsewhere? What would they mention if a colleague asked about the relationship?

The answers may point towards a strength the business has not fully recognised. They may also challenge something it considers distinctive but customers regard as a basic expectation.

We use our experience in fleet and mobility to follow those conversations in depth. By understanding the operational context, we can recognise where an apparently small detail carries real significance and ask the questions needed to explain it.

Build a position you can substantiate

One strong customer story demonstrates a particular experience. A consistent body of evidence across customers can help establish something more substantial about the business.

If customers repeatedly describe the same valuable behaviours, capabilities or outcomes, there is a stronger foundation for positioning. The task is to understand what connects those experiences, how consistently the business delivers them and why they matter to the customers it wants to attract.

A strength does not have to be unique in the entire market to be commercially valuable. It does need to be relevant, credible and sufficiently specific for the audience to understand why it should influence their choice.

We help businesses uncover that evidence and turn it into clear positioning and customer stories, told through film and written content. The aim is to make the value visible in the customer’s own experience.

Before publishing the next claim about great people or customer focus, ask whether a competitor could say exactly the same thing. Then ask which customer experience would give someone a reason to believe it about you.