Talked to 10+ businesses about customer testimonials before building anything here's what I found

Following the 'talk to customers before writing code' rule seriously spent the last 2 weeks speaking to business owners and marketing teams about what actually happens to customer testimonials after they collect them here's what I keep hearing:

→ Most businesses have folders full of testimonials collecting dust
→ The average utilization rate is maybe 5-10% of what they collect
→ The bottleneck is always time and nobody owning the process
→ The ones who DO use them systematically outperform everyone else

Real example from my research: someone with 40 testimonials sitting in Google Drive untouched for 8 months. Social media person quit and nothing is moving. Their sales guy uses maybe 3 out of 40.

Another person told me testimonial carousel posts outperform all their other content by 2-3x in saves and shares but most businesses never make them the gap isn't collecting testimonials. It's the transformation step turning raw testimonials into case studies, sales slides, social posts, and objection-handling responses for those of you running businesses:

→ Does this match your experience?
→ How does your team handle this transformation step?
→ Is this a solved problem for you or still a struggle?

Genuinely trying to understand this before building anything. Will share my complete research findings with everyone who responds.