You should run a customer closeness sprint in 2025. Here's why.

TL;DR (AI Generated)

• Last month, I had 30+ customer conversations in 3 weeks. I tell the story of how this CCS changed my perception of our customers.
• Customer Closeness Sprints are short, focused periods where all departments—sales, engineering, marketing, finance, etc.—engage directly with customers. These sprints foster empathy, improve decision-making, and enhance customer-centricity across the entire business.
• The process is broken into five phases:

- Systems Setup: Build processes to gather customer insights.

- Targeted Outreach: Engage with the right customers at the right time.

- Real-Time Analysis: Share insights as they come in.

- Democratization of Insights: Share findings across teams.

- Follow-Up: Thank customers and maintain relationships.

• Sharing insights widely helps every department drive customer-focused improvements, making these sprints a powerful tool for long-term success.

What Are Customer Closeness Sprints?

Like a maintenance sprint, where development teams focus solely on fixing critical issues, a Customer Closeness Sprint is a focused period dedicated to engaging deeply with customers. The goal is to foster a strong connection with your customer base, uncover key insights, and use this newfound understanding to inform decision-making across all departments—not just the ones traditionally associated with customer interaction.

Why Every Role Should Participate in Customer Closeness Sprints

Customer insight shouldn’t be siloed to UX or market research teams. In fact, everyone in the business—from product to engineering, sales, marketing, and even finance—can benefit from a deep understanding of customer needs. Here’s why more roles should get involved:

1. Sales Teams: tailor your pitches and truly understand the pain points of prospects

2. Engineering Teams: hearing customer feedback firsthand provides context for why certain features or fixes are crucial, helping to prioritize the right things in the product roadmap.

3. Marketing Teams: directly hear the language customers use and the emotional drivers behind their decisions

4. Customer Success Teams: give them additional structure and focus to capture insights that go beyond day-to-day support

5. Product Managers and Leadership: get an intensive way to recalibrate and make sure that decisions are truly customer-informed

6. Finance & Operations: see the bigger picture and can even guide budgetary decisions that prioritize customer impact

Challenges I Faced

Despite the massive benefits, running a customer closeness sprint came with challenges:

- Time Management: Scheduling and conducting multiple customer calls meant my calendar became packed, and balancing other responsibilities was difficult.

- Insight Management: With so much feedback coming in, organizing and following up on all the insights was a task in itself. Letting insights pile up without immediate action risked losing the value of these conversations. Thankfully, tools like Voxpopme made it easier to organize and share the learnings efficiently.

Key Takeaways from My Experience

After completing my sprint, I realized that more departments in the organization could benefit from participating in future sprints. Here are my top takeaways and recommendations:

1. You’ll Gather More Insights Than Expected: It’s remarkable how much you learn when you deeply engage with customers. Whether you’re in marketing, sales, or engineering, customer conversations will provide insights that exceed expectations.

2. Don’t Keep Insights to Yourself—Share Them Broadly: The value of customer insights grows exponentially when shared across teams. During my sprint, we combined insights from customer calls with sales and customer success feedback to create a showreel used in board meetings, executive sessions, and team discussions. Every department should have access to these learnings, allowing the entire business to be more customer-focused.

3. Adopt a Phased Approach for Sustainability: To make customer closeness sprints scalable across roles, break them down into manageable phases. Here’s a framework I recommend:

- Phase 1: Systems Setup

Start by building the right tools and processes for collecting customer insights. Whether it’s a platform like Voxpopme or another tool, make sure that each team has a clear process for recording and organizing insights from their interactions.

- Phase 2: Targeted Outreach

Make sure each department has a plan for engaging the right customers at the right time. Sales teams may want to target current prospects, while product teams might focus on frequent users of specific features.

- Phase 3: Real-Time Analysis

Don’t wait until the sprint ends to analyze feedback. Share quick insights as calls or sessions progress. Every department can share snippets, action items, and takeaways that are relevant to their own workstreams.

- Phase 4: Democratization of Insights

Compile and share overarching takeaways across the business. Ensure that every role gets access to customer insights, using video snippets where possible to add real-world context to the findings. Democratizing insights ensures they inform everyone’s decision-making.

- Phase 5: Follow-Up and Gratitude

After the sprint, follow up with customers and express your appreciation for their time and insights. This doesn’t just help customer success teams—it shows every department that their engagement with customers is part of a long-term relationship.

4. Use Tools to Record, Analyze, and Share: Whether it’s tools like Voxpopme or other customer insight platforms, the key is to record every customer interaction, analyze it systematically, and share the learnings across departments. This ensures that insights don’t just sit in one place, but become a shared asset for the entire business.

So try it - I dare you. Talk to your customers and see what happens.