The Value of Customer Closeness

Harness communities for closeness, connection, and bring customers to life through a shift from passive learning to empathy and experience.

Customer Closeness enables brands to understand the customer in greater detail, which drives revenue and provides a strategic advantage. It brings real customers into the business, impacting decision-making while moving beyond data points and adding layers that bring customers and their stories to life. The integration of Customer Closeness strategies builds empathy, as decision-makers see, hear and engage with customer stories directly. It complements knowledge with context and experience, translating abstract insights into a shared understanding that strengthens strategic decision-making.

Customer Confidence Programme

Supercharge the voice of the customer and leave a lasting impression.

Add layers to your data points to bring customers and their stories to life through Customer Closeness sessions and empathy workshops. The programme brings decision-makers into direct contact with customers, allowing for natural conversations between the two sides, developing understanding and empathy.

It is a simple, repeatable process that brings real customer voices into every level of decisions. First, the Customer Closeness Sessions. Then, the Empathy Workshops.

The benefits to both customer and business are clear; the Customer Confidence Programme supports cultural change within the business, enables decision-makers to hear first-hand feedback and makes customers feel valued. It captures the realities, pressures and expectations of customer lives and layers real stories onto your existing data, giving decision-makers a three-dimensional understanding of needs, risk and opportunities.

Co-design Labs

Bring customers and decision-makers together to solve tactical issues.

Customer closeness isn’t just about understanding - it is also built through collaboration. In our Co-design Labs, we bring customers and decision-makers together to work on specific challenges.

After identifying issues, discussing priorities and exploring solutions with customers – decision-makers are empowered with newfound confidence.

After the session, a facilitated workshop with decision-makers produces a clear, accountable record of solutions and action accountability.

This approach does two things. First, it improves outcomes by ensuring solutions are viable in the real world. Second, it builds internal alignment and accountability. When decision-makers have co-created solutions with customers, ownership is stronger and implementation more decisive.

Hear from Danielle Wilkinson

Customer Closeness Practice Lead

Danielle's expertise speaks for itself. 

A former Associate Director for Human8 with a wealth of industry experience, she has been shortlisted for an AURA Insight Impact Award and holds an MRS advanced certificate.

Her Sociology MA provides her with an understanding of societal structures, structuring business decision-making, and organisational culture.

“Customer closeness is about moving beyond hearing customer feedback to truly understanding customer lives. The focus of this new offering is to support the work of research teams and create new organisational capabilities. 

Many of the clientside researchers I speak to feel frustrated by the disconnect between data and decision-making. The truth is that customer input simply isn’t strategically prioritised in the same way that financial and operational considerations are. But getting insight to the top table won’t change that. To create lasting change, our new Closeness practice is about shaping better decisions and practices at all levels.”

Keep customers close with InsightHub

InsightHub is the agile research platform that empowers global brands to streamline, scale and supercharge customer insight. Built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern insight teams, InsightHub can centrally host surveys, long-term communities, dedicated panels and short-term projects all within the same easy-to-use space.

FAQs

Does Customer Closeness require an InsightHub licence?

The Customer Closeness Practice is an independent consulting offering from FlexMR. Annual Customer Confidence Programmes are built around the data collection, analysis and activation capabilities of InsightHub and a full licence is required. Ad-hoc Co-Design Labs may be facilitated through the InsightHub platform but do not require an annual licence. For more information, please get in touch.

How long is a Customer Closeness programme?

The Customer Confidence Programme is an annual commitment curated for those with annual InsightHub licences. The Co-design Lab is short-term in design. For more information, please contact us.

Why Customer Closeness?

At a time when uncertainty, complexity and competitive pressure is rife, can your growth strategy afford to ignore customer closeness and its strateigic advantage? Discover how our team of experts can help you harness a community for closeness, connection, and bringing customers to life.

Get in touch

Got questions for us or simply want to know more? Schedule a call with our team of research experts to see how we can help you streamline, scale and supercharge insights.

The case for closeness

Looking to read more about Customer Closeness? Our team of experts have created a guide to detail the impact that the strategy could have on your operations.

Why closeness matters

Find out more about why Customer Closeness is crucial in Danielle Wilkinson's latest blog: How to Build a Customer-Centric Competitive Advantage.

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