On February 25th, 2026 - the FlexMR team hosted a webinar that explored four creative ways to elevate insight with video. Developed in response to the most common pledge at the the 2025 Customer Salience Summit (to use more video), the hour long session considered applications in online communities, closeness programmes, customer experience feedback and insight communications. Here's what one attendee said about the session:
I just wanted to say thank you to you and the FlexMR team for the Webinar this morning. When it comes to using video, I know functional and emotional concerns exist on both the customer and client-side. But the possibilities are exciting. My brain was firing. Love the ideas that were shared. Great thinking.
If you missed the live session, not to worry - I've summarised the key points below. Or you can grab a copy of the on-demand recording here.
So, what did we discuss? Well, let's start with the context. In an era of dashboards, KPIs and CRM optimisation, it’s easy for customers to become data points. But insight-led organisations know that competitive advantage doesn’t come from more data alone. At FlexMR, we see video not as a research add-on, but as an opportunity for growth and a way to embed the customer more fully into the business.
We know that because video is more memorable, it is an anchor for empathy and a driver for action and when used intentionally, it strengthens customer closeness, accelerates alignment, and drives better decisions. It’s an invaluable tool in building customer salience. Here are a few powerful ways you can go about elevating insight with video.
#1 - Turn Communities into Libraries
Many brands run insight communities. Few fully unlock their longitudinal value. Video transforms communities from discussion platforms into living, breathing customer ecosystems. Think about creating a reusable, searchable repository of real customer voices, through your community not just a space to just run projects.
Why does it work? Building video libraries as we do via VideoMR captures authentic, in-the-moment reactions, it builds a continuously evolving archive of customer stories. Video can be captured via surveys, interviews, focus groups, or standalone projects, from both community members, and non-members.
Best Practice Tip
You can encourage community members to share videos by sharing videos yourself, ask questions via video and let the community see the researchers behind the scenes.
But the real value emerges when organisations look at other ways to widen the use of video such as by delegating access to wider teams or running collaborative workshops with decision-makers in which they re-watch videos and clip the most impactful parts.
Video research doesn’t just have to sit with the insight team; you can empower decision-makers to conduct customer interviews directly and let them hear the customer voice themselves. You can get a better ROI from your video library by using the historical footage to track perception shifts over time.
#2 - Continuous Video Pulses
Insight loses impact when it becomes episodic. Forward-thinking brands are embedding ongoing video tasks into their research ecosystems to create a continuous pulse. To give you a few examples in action:
- Retail & Youth Audiences: Invite younger consumers to share a “haul” video, followed by a basket-build task to explore motivations.
- Energy & Utilities: Ask participants to document their “energy life,” making invisible consumption behaviours visible.
- B2B Professional Growth Diaries: Capture intentions, behaviours and emotional pressure points over time.
These tasks - tailored to industries and audiences - build emotional context around behavioural data, surfacing the why behind the what and when. By creating regular opportunities to share videos, it becomes an organic part of your research programme, not just something to be done when a project requires it.
#3 - Supercharging Closeness
There’s a difference between knowing your customer and feeling connected to them. Watching interviews, focus groups or reading transcripts builds understanding. Speaking to someone first hand builds empathy. Traditional research projects, whilst useful and definitely still have their place, they relate to a specific problem or research need. It’s where businesses hear about customers and their opinions via slides, summaries and stats.
Instead, closeness programmes bring customers into the business, moving beyond customers as data points by adding layers to bring them and their stories to life. Our Customer Closeness programme doesn’t just enable face-to-face closeness sessions; we bring in video.
After the initial decision-audit which we identify with decision-makers what we would like to explore, we have the closeness sessions themselves, which take place online via video. These are run in a speed-dating format, with 6-8 customers and a matching number of decision-makers. They’re structured as relaxed discussions, 15 minutes each, approachable and low-pressure. They’re designed so that each decision-maker speaks individually to each customer, in a 1-to-1 video format.
They’re short enough to feel manageable, long enough to capture nuance, and designed to create a shared experience across multiple customer voices.
Best Practice Tip
Use video as a tool to just have a chat with customers; don't position it as an IDI, it's a 15 min coffee break chat.
We run multiple cohorts over the year, to build customer understanding and evidence, and the sessions themselves are captured via video, adding to your video library. After each cohort of the closeness sessions, we then have the empathy workshops.
This is where we bring together the decision-makers who took part in the conversations, for an interactive workshop. Here decision-makers use video clips from the closeness sessions to create montages to tell the story of the customers. The video montages then act as an influential communications tool to make insight and the customer story land. It’s an impactful evidence source.
You ultimately end up with a powerful knowledge bank of your customer with both raw and curated video footage. Customer Closeness is where passive learning becomes cognitive empathy, and where insight begins to influence behaviour and culture.
#4 - Bring Emotion into CX
CX feedback mechanisms often prioritise functional performance. But service experiences are emotional. Historically, CX surveys have combined core quant metrics with open-ended questions to understand the why. You know what’s driven a customer’s likelihood to recommend, their satisfaction or their effort score, but you don’t know how they have felt during the interaction.
This is why we integrate Video Booth into our CX feedback surveys, the video captured introduces an emotional layer that structured data alone cannot. When combining Video Booth responses with PromptAI it really starts to open eyes to what, and why customers are feeling during their interactions with your brand.
Seeing frustration, relief, confusion or delight on a customer’s face changes the way decision-makers respond. It stops them viewing customers as numbers or transactions and instead makes them see customers as people. It drives action because decision-makers start to empathise with customers, and truly experience their pain points.
Best Practice Tip
Don’t worry if you only get a handful of videos. The metrics, the verbatims give the volume; video is there to build the emotion. You might have 20% of customers reporting an issue, but only get 2 videos on it. Those two videos will build far more emotion, and make it more likely for action to happen, than the verbatims and quotes from the 20% would.
Just collecting video footage isn’t enough. As part of our CX feedback programmes, we collate video from CX surveys into easily shareable video montages which are shared around, not just the CX team, but the wider business. We use the montages as part of the intelligence forums we run alongside our CX feedback programmes.
Doing this fosters alignment. Montages create shared context; teams see the same customer and decisions are grounded in real-world experiences. Having this shared understanding of the customer reduces siloed interpretations and makes it easier for brands to make decisions which are meaningful for the customer.
Video as a Communication Tool
Video isn’t just for capturing customers and we don’t necessarily need consumers to feature to use it as part of our insight communication strategy. It combines visuals, voice, and motion, which keeps attention better than static slides. Viewers are more likely to watch a short video end-to-end than read a full deck. When communicating with decision-makers, video has some additional strategic advantages beyond engagement:
- A slide deck invites scanning. A well-crafted video invites listening. Listening encourages reflection which is essential for true insight absorption.
- With slides, executives often skim ahead or jump to conclusions. With video, you can control pacing, sequence the logic deliberately and build context before revealing conclusions.
- Recording a concise video forces you to sharpen the insight, it clarifies the “so what?” and it eliminates unnecessary detail.
- If short of time, viewers can watch at 1.5–2× speed. It also offers the opportunity to pause or rewind, or watch subsequent times.
- If multiple decision makers watch the same explanation, everyone hears the same framing, it’s much easier to get to the shared understanding that is needed for good decision making.
Instead of 60-minute debriefs, you can provide for example, an 8-minute pre-read video and then follow up with a short, focused decision meeting. You can use it to share some topline, or interim findings; summarise key talking points from a debrief, or even use it as a teaser to encourage attendance at a debrief.
Other way in which we can use video outside of a project-sphere include using it to share some interesting organic learnings from a community, or even highlight a key customer story, integrating your video with theirs.
Best Practice Tip
Have a go, be brave and experiment with video! It doesn’t have to be a brilliantly produced video, an authentic video can have just as much, if not more impact.
In many companies, most people still default to slide decks. Using concise, high-quality video makes your insights stand out, it signals modern communication, increases memorability and creates a mental anchor to better aid decision making. When insight is delivered visually and emotionally, it travels further inside organisations.
From Data Points to Impact
Video reintroduces humanity. It helps decision-makers see and feel the customer more closely. When leaders consistently encounter real customer faces and voices, they’re far more likely to bring those customers to mind when making strategic decisions. That is customer salience in practice.
In 2026 and beyond, organisations that build customer salience deliberately will outperform those who treat insight as a reporting function.
