In a world awash with data, dashboards and quarterly trackers, it is surprisingly easy to forget that underneath it all - customers are people. They have lives, feel pressures, make trade-offs and hold contradictory opinions that rarely sit neatly inside a chart. Data tells us what is happening. Conversations tell us why. Spending time with customers reveals what isn’t always obvious. Not behaviours, but motivations.
Why should we care about motivations? Because, increasingly, competitive advantage is not won by those with the most data, but by those with the deepest understanding. Customer closeness is about moving beyond simply listening to feedback to empathising with customers – and turning that capability into a strategic tool. It is about recognising that insight is not simply an input into decision-making, but something that must be felt, internalised and carried into the room when decisions are made.
As brands contend with rising uncertainty, tighter margins and accelerating change, investing in staying close to customers has become a strategic choice in its own right. Yet despite years of rhetoric around customer centricity, a stubborn gap remains. Research suggests that while three-quarters of senior executives say customer centricity is critical to success, only a small minority believe their firm achieves it. The ambition is there. The practice, often, is not.
When practices fall short, consequences follow. Organisations that are poorly aligned with customers tend to grow more slowly and generate weaker returns. By contrast, firms that consistently bring the customer perspective into strategic and operational decisions tend to innovate more effectively, prioritise more clearly, and avoid costly missteps.
The team at FlexMR have spent years helping brands collect and interpret customer insight. But over that time, it has become clear to me that insight alone is not enough. What matters is how insight is experienced inside the organisation, and whether it meaningfully shapes decisions. That is the belief which sits behind the launch of our new Closeness Practice. Our aim is simple: to embed customer understanding directly into decision-making, and to build Customer Salience.
Bridging the Insight to Action Gap
Often, market research unintentionally creates distance. Customer views are captured, analysed and summarised, then presented to decision-makers in slides or reports. Attendees hear about customers. They may even empathise with them. But the learning is passive, second-hand and abstract. It rarely produces the depth of understanding needed to make confident trade-offs, especially when decisions are complex or contested.
This is where many organisations stall. They have the customer understanding, but struggle to make it live in decisions. Decision-makers know what customers say, but not what it feels like to use their products, services or systems. Without that, customer considerations are easily outweighed by internal pressures – whether they are cost pressures, operational constraints, or revenue targets.
Customer closeness addresses this by reducing the distance between insight and decision-making. It is not about replacing data, but about layering it with context, emotion and narrative. This kind of direct interaction allows decision-makers to build empathy which, in turn, leads to more customer-centric decisions.
When leaders have spent time speaking directly with customers, the nature of conversations changes. Abstract debates about priorities become grounded in real trade-offs faced by real people. Decisions feel less theoretical and more consequential. Crucially, this understanding persists. Long after individual projects end, customer voices remain present at points of decision.
Our Programme of Customer Closeness
The FlexMR Closeness Practice is designed around this objective. It’s a portfolio of consulting services rooted in empathy, co-design and organisational learning, aimed at strengthening Customer Salience across the business. It combines long-term programmes with more focused interventions, allowing organisations to embed closeness at a pace that suits them. So, what exactly do we offer?
At the heart of the practice is the Customer Confidence Programme. This is a structured, repeatable approach to bringing customers to life. Small groups of decision-makers engage directly with customers through a series of facilitated conversations, run in cohorts over time. The format is deliberately flexible and low-pressure, encouraging natural dialogue rather than formal research. Sessions are short enough to be manageable, but long enough to surface nuance and complexity.
What matters here is repetition. Over time, exposure to multiple customer voices builds pattern recognition and confidence. Decision-makers begin to move beyond anecdote to understanding. They stop asking, “What do customers think?” and start asking, “How will this affect customers’ lives?”
These conversations are synthesised through facilitated Empathy Workshops which use curated video clips drawn directly from the sessions. Video is important part of this process because it resists being reduced to statistics. Tone, emotion, facial reactions and even subtle hesitations all remain intact. These materials can be shared across the organisation, extending the reach of customer voices well beyond those in the room.
The programme culminates in an in-house Closeness Event, opening up the experience to the wider business. Colleagues are invited to explore the insights, but more importantly, to speak directly with customers themselves. By inviting customers into the organisation for such an event, it sends a powerful message that customers voices matter. Customers feel valued and listened to, and employees experience first-hand the people impacted by the decisions they make every day.
Co-Design Labs
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 – a facilitated workshop with decision-makers produces a clear 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.
Why Customer Closeness Matters Today
Too often, customer insight struggles to influence decisions that matter. Customer closeness changes the nature of that influence. It transforms insight from something that is presented, into something that is experienced. Over time, it helps build a culture where customers are a constant reference point in strategic and operational thinking.
In an era where the cost of getting decisions wrong is rising, distance from customers is a growing risk. The question is no longer whether brands should invest in customer closeness, but whether they can afford not to.
