Customer Closeness is a megaphone for insight

I’m a big music fan. I have a playlist for every situation from gentle ambient background noises while I work, to funky sing-along disco for summer BBQs in the garden. But music would be nothing without amplifiers to make those wonderful noises clear and audible. They’re a key ingredient to hear the music clearly enough to feel something… and occasionally break out into Dad dancing.

I think Customer Closeness sessions play a similar role as an amplifier to the ‘music’ of customer voices.

The challenge with customer insight

Insight teams (and the agencies they work with) are fundamentally here to help build a deeper understanding of customers’ needs and wants. Often they might be playing the right music, but it’s increasingly difficult to get people within the business to listen closely. The instrument is usually PowerPoint, and the audience often have a mountain of other things to read, review, or write themselves.

That’s where the magic lies in Closeness – it’s like going to a gig with your colleagues, but the band is a group of carefully chosen customers. It brings freshness through a shared experience that carries the voice of the customer further into the organisation than a written report or chart ever could.

Closeness brings a fresh perspective to ‘known’ insights

Attending Closeness sessions is a memorable experience for all involved, even for those who have been to several sessions. Every session is a unique group of customers with personal stories to share, but you don’t have to hear 100% new insights at each session for it to be valuable. Noticing repetition means you're hearing views held by lots of customers and can trust what you're hearing.

As Clive Bolton, CEO of Life Insurance at M&G observed after attending a session this year, “Hearing people talk about what it's like to use your product is always insightful and often a bit humbling!”

Closeness creates memorable moments

In a recent Closeness session focused on onboarding, a customer showed a thick stack of documents he received when signing up with the client’s business. He talked about how unnecessary the printing was and how much of a burden it felt for him to read.

That was already a known issue within the business but it was such a strikingly visual moment that it created a fresh wave of motivation to do something about it. Live Closeness sessions are a dedicated moment in time to hear the tune of critical issues played in new ways, bringing the data to life via raw, unfiltered truth.

Customer insight is an important part of any healthy business, but sometimes it needs a megaphone.

It's brilliant to see how Customer Closeness brings fresh energy to get everyone singing together, which makes for a business that's more agile and more in tune with its customers.