A founder I know spent four months building a case study. Interviews, design passes, pull quotes, the whole production. It looked great. It converted at about 2%.
Meanwhile, a support thread where her team publicly walked a frustrated customer through a billing error — step by step, no deflection, full resolution in 90 minutes — was getting screenshotted and shared in Slack groups. Three enterprise deals in Q3 traced back to prospects who saw that thread before they ever visited the marketing site.
The polished page said "trust us." The support thread said "watch us."
Mid-market buyers are professionally skeptical. They've been burned by vendors who looked polished on the way in and vanished when something broke. A case study tells them what you want them to hear. A support interaction tells them what happens when things go wrong.
That difference matters because every buyer walks into a deal with the same unspoken question: What will it be like when I need help?
A public resolution thread answers that question without any sales involvement. It shows your response time, your tone under pressure, your willingness to say "we messed up," and your ability to actually fix the problem. No brand copy replicates that signal.
Think of it like choosing a restaurant. A professional photo of the food tells you something. But overhearing the manager handle a complaint with grace and a comped dessert — that tells you everything.
This isn't about staging support interactions or cherry-picking the flattering ones. Buyers can smell that from three tabs away. The practice is simpler and more honest.
Notice when a resolution goes well. Not every support thread is worth sharing. Look for the ones where a real problem surfaced, your team handled it with clarity and speed, and the customer ended up better off than before. These threads have a natural arc: tension, action, resolution.
Ask the customer. Before you do anything with a support interaction, ask if they're comfortable with it being visible. Some will say no. Respect that completely. Many will say yes — especially if their problem was genuinely fixed, because it reflects well on them too. They chose the right vendor.
Preserve the mess. The temptation is to edit, clean up the rough edges, remove the part where the customer was clearly annoyed. Resist that. The rough edges are the trust signal. A thread where everything is smooth reads like marketing. A thread where someone was frustrated and then wasn't — that reads like reality.
Put it where buyers already are. A resolution thread buried in your help desk does nothing. Surface it where prospects visit during evaluation: your docs site, your company blog, your sales team's follow-up emails. One founder I spoke with keeps a "How we handle problems" page that's nothing but real support threads with permission. It's the second most visited page on the site, after pricing.
Founders separate support and marketing into different budget lines, different teams, different mental categories. Support is cost. Marketing is growth. That framing makes the wall between them feel natural.
But from the buyer's side, there is no wall. Every interaction is evidence. A marketing page and a support reply sit in the same mental folder labeled "what these people are actually like."
When you treat support as a cost center, you optimize for ticket closure speed and deflection rate. When you treat it as a trust-building surface, you optimize for clarity, honesty, and visible resolution. The second approach costs roughly the same. It just requires caring about the outcome beyond the ticket.
Public support threads expose your failure modes. That's the whole point, but it's also the risk. If your product breaks the same way repeatedly, a collection of public threads will make that pattern visible. You can't adopt this practice as a marketing tactic and ignore what it reveals about your product.
The practice only works if you actually fix the underlying problems. The founder with the billing error thread? Her team rebuilt the billing flow the following month. The next time someone shared that thread, prospects could see both the original problem and the fact that it no longer existed. That story is more convincing than any case study.
You don't need a program, a process, or a new tool. You need one good support interaction, one customer willing to let you share it, and one place to put it where buyers will see it.
The next time your team resolves something well, pause before closing the ticket. Ask: would a skeptical buyer trust us more if they saw this? If yes, that thread is worth more than your next blog post, ad campaign, or case study.
The best proof that you can be trusted isn't something you write. It's something you did, in the open, when it mattered.
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