The Fourteen Deaths of a Perfectly Good Post

The first draft was forty-three words.

Cass read it twice, then a third time, because it was the kind of thing that made you stop scrolling. It was from Priya Okonkwo, VP of Customer Success at StratusEdge, and it said this:

Last week a client told me our onboarding process made her cry. Not from frustration. From relief. She’d switched from a provider that ghosted her for three months. I don’t have a framework for this. I just wanted to say: we heard you, Daniela. We’ll keep hearing you.

That was it. No bullet points. No “three things I learned.” Just a real person saying a real thing about a real moment.

Cass screenshotted it and sent it to the employee advocacy Slack channel with a single message: This is the one.

Round two came back from Priya’s line manager, Geoff.

Geoff had added a sentence at the top: At StratusEdge, we pride ourselves on putting the customer at the centre of everything we do. He’d also changed “made her cry” to “moved her emotionally” and added a link to the company’s onboarding case study page.

Cass stared at it for a full minute. Then she quietly removed the link and changed “moved her emotionally” back to “made her cry.” She left Geoff’s opening sentence in, because you have to pick your wars, and this was only round two.

Round three. Legal flagged “Daniela” as a potential GDPR issue. Cass asked Priya if Daniela had consented. She had. In writing. Cass forwarded the consent form. Legal said they’d “follow up.”

Round four. Legal circled back. They wanted “Daniela” changed to “a client.” Cass pushed back. Legal pushed harder. “Daniela” became “a client.”

The post now opened with a corporate mission statement and referred to a real human being as “a client.” But the bones were still there. The crying was still there. Cass could work with this.

Round five. Marketing wanted to add a CTA. “Something light,” they said. “Just a ‘learn more about our onboarding experience’ button.” Cass said it was a LinkedIn post, not a landing page. Marketing said they understood, but could she just add one line at the end? Something like: Want to experience onboarding that puts you first? Let’s talk.

Cass typed and deleted four responses. She settled on: I’ll see what fits.

She did not add the CTA.

Round six. Priya’s line manager’s line manager, Helen, saw the draft. Helen loved it. Helen thought it was “super authentic.” Helen also thought it could benefit from some data. “Could we add the NPS score? Our onboarding NPS is 87. That’s really strong.”

Cass explained that the post worked because it was a specific human story, not a metric. Helen said she understood completely. Then she asked again about the NPS score.

Round seven. The NPS score was in.

The post now read:

At StratusEdge, we pride ourselves on putting the customer at the centre of everything we do. Last week a client told me our onboarding process moved her to tears - not from frustration, but from relief. She’d switched from a provider that left her unsupported for months. With an onboarding NPS of 87, we know we’re on the right track, but it’s moments like these that remind us why we do what we do.

Cass read it and felt nothing.

Round eight. Brand wanted to check the tone against their new voice guidelines. The word “tears” was flagged as “potentially negative in a product context.” They suggested “made a real impact.”

Round nine. Someone - Cass never found out who - added the phrase “and that’s the StratusEdge difference.”

Round ten. Priya emailed Cass directly. Is this still my post? she asked. Cass didn’t know how to answer that.

Round eleven. The comms team wanted to “tighten it up” and submitted a version that began with Onboarding isn’t just a process - it’s a promise. Cass read it aloud at her desk and her colleague Sam looked over and said, “LinkedIn bingo?”

Round twelve. Geoff suggested adding Priya’s job title and a headshot in line with their “executive visibility initiative.” The post was now accompanied by a corporate portrait of Priya in which she was smiling in front of a StratusEdge-branded pull-up banner, holding a coffee cup that said INNOVATION STARTS HERE.

Round thirteen. Final sign-off meeting. Six people on a Teams call. Priya was not invited. The group agreed the post was “really strong” and “very on-brand.” Someone used the word “polished” as a compliment.

Round fourteen. Cass hit publish.

The post got forty-one likes. Twelve of those were from StratusEdge employees who’d been asked to engage with it as part of the advocacy programme. Three were from Geoff’s wife’s LinkedIn account. One was from a recruitment bot.

Nobody commented.

Nobody shared it.

Nobody cried.

That evening, Priya posted something from her personal account. No one had reviewed it. No one had been consulted. It said:

I’ve been in customer success for nine years and last Tuesday was the first time a client called me just to say thank you. Not for fixing something. Not for escalating something. Just - thank you for listening. Her name is Daniela and she gave me permission to say this: being heard shouldn’t feel like a luxury. But for a lot of people switching platforms, it does. I don’t have a neat takeaway. I just think about that call a lot.

It got 600 engagements by morning. Forty-two comments, most of them from customer success people sharing their own stories. One from Daniela herself, who wrote: Priya, you’re the reason I stayed.

Geoff shared Priya’s post the next day with the caption: So proud of our team at StratusEdge! This is what customer-centricity looks like in action. It got three likes.

Cass saved both posts in a folder on her desktop. She labelled it Evidence.

She opened a new doc and started typing a proposal. It was short. It argued for one thing: that the advocacy programme should let people sound like themselves. That the review chain should be two people, maximum. That if a post needed fourteen rounds of editing, it wasn’t being improved - it was being buried.

She didn’t know if anyone would read it. She sent it to Priya first.

Priya replied in four minutes: This is the one.