Every collection of testimonials has a few that read like filler. "Great product, would recommend." "The team was fantastic to work with." "Best decision we made this year." They are positive, they are real, and they persuade almost no one — because a prospect reading them cannot picture themselves in the story. A generic testimonial is not a bad testimonial exactly; it is an incomplete one. The praise is there, but the evidence that would make the praise believable is missing. The good news is that generic quotes are almost always fixable, either by going back to the customer for the missing piece or by working with what a fuller conversation already gave you.
This guide covers how to tell when a testimonial is too generic, why it happens, how to get the specifics that fix it, and how to rescue a vague quote without inventing anything.
How to tell a testimonial is too generic
The test is simple: could this exact sentence be pasted onto a competitor's website without anyone noticing? If yes, it is generic. "Great product, highly recommend" fits any company in any industry. It carries no information that is specific to you, to the customer, or to the problem that got solved.
A persuasive testimonial fails that swap test because it is anchored to particulars a competitor could not borrow:
- A specific problem the customer had before they found you.
- A specific outcome — a number, a timeframe, a task that used to be painful and no longer is.
- A specific detail that only someone who actually used the product would know to mention.
When all three are missing, the quote is decoration. When even one is present, it starts doing real work.
Why testimonials come out generic in the first place
Generic praise is almost never a sign that the customer is lukewarm. It is a sign of how you asked. When you send a request that says "would you mind writing a quick testimonial?", you are handing the customer a blank page and a vague brief. Under those conditions, even a delighted customer defaults to the safest, most general praise they can think of, because summarizing their entire experience in one line is genuinely hard. They reach for "great product" not because that is all they feel, but because that is what comes out when no one has pointed them at the specifics.
That means the fix usually lives upstream, in the ask. This is closely related to how to get a testimonial that mentions a specific feature without sounding scripted — the same principle applies to the whole quote, not just the feature. Specific questions produce specific answers.
Go back to the customer for the missing piece
If a customer gave you a generic quote, you are allowed to go back — warmly and without implying their first attempt was inadequate. The move is to ask a narrow, easy question that surfaces exactly the detail the quote is missing.
Instead of "could you make it more specific?", which pushes the work back onto them, ask a question they can answer in one sentence:
- "What was the main thing this replaced or fixed for your team?"
- "Roughly how much time does this save you in a typical week?"
- "What was frustrating about how you did this before us?"
Then you fold their answer into the quote and send it back for approval. A customer who wrote "great product, highly recommend" might tell you, when asked directly, that it "cut our monthly close from five days to two." That single sentence transforms the testimonial, and the customer supplied it — you only asked the right question. Running that approval step is worth doing carefully; see what to do when a customer wants to approve the final testimonial wording for how to keep it fast and faithful.
Rescue a vague quote you already have
Sometimes you cannot go back — the customer has moved on, or the relationship does not support another ask. You can still often rescue a generic quote, as long as you rescue it honestly.
The line you must not cross is inventing specifics. You cannot add "saved us 20 hours a week" because it would sound good; that is fabrication, and it exposes you the moment the customer sees it. What you can do is mine what you legitimately already have:
- Your own records. If your onboarding notes, support history, or a recorded call show a concrete result the customer confirmed, you may surface it — ideally with a quick "okay to mention this?" check.
- The attribution. A generic quote gains credibility from a specific, named, titled source. "Great product" from "VP of Operations, [named company]" is far stronger than the same words unattributed, because the reader can see a real, accountable person stands behind it.
- The surrounding context. Placing a short generic quote next to a specific one, or beneath a headline that supplies the concrete claim the quote lacks, lets the pair do what neither does alone.
If none of that is available and you cannot reach the customer, the honest move is to retire the quote rather than dress it up. A generic testimonial that stays generic is taking up space a stronger one could use.
Prevent it next time: ask for the story, not the summary
The durable fix is to stop asking customers to summarize. A summary is what produces "great product." A story is what produces specifics. Structure your request so the customer answers two or three concrete questions — what was hard before, what changed, what result they can point to — and assemble the testimonial from their answers rather than asking them to write the finished line themselves. You will get sharper raw material, the customer will find it easier, and you will rarely be left staring at another quote that could belong to anyone.
Generic is not a verdict on the customer's enthusiasm. It is a gap in the evidence — and evidence is something you can almost always go and get.