After a day of inspiring presentations and workshops, we asked attendees of the 2025 FlexMR Customer Salience Summit a simple question. When you leave here, what will you do differently based on what you learned today?
Over 60 attendees submitted pledges, committing to the one thing they will do differently. We’ll be checking in on progress in 3 months’ time. But, for now, we’ve distilled those pledges into a set of actionable takeaways that summarise the key learnings from the summit. These are things you can apply in your everyday work to build a customer-centric culture, get more out of your insight, and have a greater impact on decisions.
1. Get to REALLY Know Your Stakeholders
Understanding stakeholders isn’t just about identifying what makes them tick. It’s about diving beneath the surface to uncover what truly drives their decisions. Find out what their agendas are, what pressures they face, and what motivates them to act. Perhaps even start with the simple question of asking what KPIs they are measured against. For this is one of the most important factors that will drive their decision-making frames.
As Judy Taylor and Jane Frost reminded us during the Summit, communication only creates impact when it’s delivered in a language stakeholders understand. Data may not be political. But influence sure is. And influence starts by understanding the levers you can pull on to shape those decision-making frames.
So, make it your mission to translate data into relevance. Speak their language. Connect insight to their strategic goals. When you do, your work will go further.
2. Be the Person Who Connects the Dots
Data and insight live in every corner of an organisation, often hidden away in team silos.
As insight professionals, our greatest value lies in bringing all of those pieces together. We must not only produce information, but connect the dots (many of which exist beyond the walls of the research team) to tell a coherent, compelling story.
Alan Gilchrist explained this role with a handy metaphor. Imagine your marketing function as the central hub of in an office. It’s the linchpin that ties everything together. Not owning any particular function, but connecting them and greasing the wheels of commercial activity. Data should be flowing in, and decision-making guidance out. So, how can you do this? Start by mapping what data exists, where it lives, and who owns it. Once you can see the full picture, you can weave it into a narrative that drives alignment and action across teams.
At FlexMR, we support insight teams in achieving this with Sprint Reviews that are underpinned by ActivateMR. Our Sprint Review service involves facilitating a regular, bi-monthly meeting that brings together different insights and teams to level the playing field.
It’s an approach which ensures no one is left with gaps in their knowledge and everyone has a shared understanding of the customer landscape. By creating unified, but nuanced, view, teams can pull together as a collective force, aligned around the same truths and empowered to take meaningful action from the insights.
3. Bring Customers Closer to Decision-Makers
Inspired by Charlotte Vicary’s tales of bringing customers into the boardroom, many attendees pledged to start or expand Customer Closeness Programmes.
These programmes help senior leaders experience real customer challenges first-hand, creating empathy, sparking new ideas, and ensuring decisions reflect genuine needs.
At FlexMR, our Video Close Connection programmes enable research teams to connect senior stakeholders with customers in a similar way. These short, one-on-one conversations allow decision-makers to hear authentic stories directly from multiple consumers, creating an immediate sense of empathy and understanding that data alone simply can’t deliver.
4. Breathe Life into Customer Stories
Bring colour to customer perspectives through their stories, rather than just reporting on data points.
Use tools such as pen portraits or customer-of-the-month activities to add a crucial human-interest angle to your insight communications. When you bring people to life, you enable stakeholders to connect with your audience on a deeper, more emotional level and see them in glorious Technicolour.
What’s the best way to bring stories to life? Of course, storytelling is a key skill. But it starts with how your research engages with customers. Survey are dull, flat and two-dimensions. But online communities are an ideal mechanism for bringing that richness. Our insight communities offer an ongoing window into customers’ worlds, revealing not just what they think, but what they feel and do.
5. Start Small, Build Momentum
In reflecting on Ellie Osborne’s presentation, I’m reminded of the immortal quote from the tennis legend, Arthur Ashe: “To achieve greatness, start where you are, use what you have, and do what you can.”
What this means for researchers is that instead of waiting for the perfect platform, process, or even moment - start small and simple. By sharing human stories, not just data points, you’ll make your insights more relatable and memorable. Over time, these small beginnings can grow into a strong, insight-driven culture across the organisation.
Ellie demonstrated this momentum building process in action by telling the story of the community Saga built with the FlexMR InsightHub platform. In this session, she described how a single snowflake of insight became a catalyst for richer storytelling and deeper organisational engagement. But Saga isn’t the only brand we work with to build strategic momentum. Curo has credited their insight community as incremental at first, and then transformational in shifting how their teams make decisions.
6. Harness the Power of Video
Video is fast becoming one of the most powerful storytelling tools for researchers. Whether its short clips shared with executives via WhatsApp (as Rupesh demonstrated in the Summit Pitch Battle) or polished summaries where customers tell their stories in their own words, video bridges the gap between data and emotion.
Integrating video into your existing work can make the information more memorable and impactful, transforming static reports into experiences that linger long after the meeting ends. At FlexMR, this is something which has long been important to us.
VideoMR, an analysis and distribution tool within the InsightHub platform helps research teams create quick impact. We’ve worked with Saffron Building Society, M&G, RVU and many more to build libraries of video footage that can be edited, stitched together, and shared across teams, bringing customer voices to life in a way that no slide deck ever could. These visual stories provide far greater impact than pages of verbatim quotes buried in survey results, helping evidence insight with authenticity, emotion, and clarity.
7. Measure What Really Matters
Measuring success shouldn’t stop at the number of attendees who joined a debrief. Think bigger. Evaluate the strategic and cultural impact of your work.
Is insight shaping better decisions? Is it helping teams think more customer-first? Is it influencing behaviour, process, or language within the organisation? These are the markers of genuine, lasting impact. When insight becomes part of the organisational DNA, that’s when transformation truly happens.
8. Above All… Don’t Be Dull
If you’re bored pulling it together, your audience will be bored reading it. The best insight work is creative, dynamic, and engaging. Challenge yourself to experiment, to tell stories differently, and to break away from the ordinary.
Because if there was one unifying message from the summit, it was: be brave. Challenge the status quo. Don’t wait for permission to make change happen. Build the momentum, brick by brick, and bring your organisation along with you.
Take a leaf out of British Gas Business’ book. At the recent MRS B2B conference, Stuart Hotchkiss explained how the brand worked with us to elevate the creative impact of insight. After discovering how debt collection letters were creating barriers between customers and their payments – this insight was reported in letters sent to stakeholders written in the same tone those sent to customers.
The exercise made stakeholders stop, reflect, and truly consider how their communications might impact customers at an already sensitive time. It was bold, human, and highly effective.
Ultimately, it was proof that creativity in insight delivery can lead to deeper understanding and real behavioural change.
Final Thoughts
The 2025 Customer Salience Summit reminded us that the power of insight doesn’t lie in data alone. It lies in our ability to connect, inspire, and move people to act. Whether it’s through empathy, storytelling, or creativity, every small step you take toward customer-centricity adds up to lasting impact. Catch up with the on-demand summit here.
