Key takeaways
- Always on research is a continuous, scalable approach to understanding customers in the flow of their daily lives – not a one-off project or quarterly check-in.
- Videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts shared by participants give you presence and context that numbers alone can't capture: facial expressions, tone, environment, and routine.
- Voice of Customer programmes have traditionally been dominated by satisfaction scores, NPS, and churn rates. These metrics describe but don't reveal. Always on research closes that gap.
- Common use cases include market research, UX and product design, brand strategy, and academic or social research.
- With Indeemo, you can run an always on programme end to end – recruit from a global panel, capture in-the-moment submissions in 30+ languages, and analyse with generative AI.
Why does always on research matter?
Customers don't always wait for surveys to share their thoughts. They post, record, react, and express in real time, across contexts, from the palm of their hands.
For market researchers, this shift demands a new mindset. It's no longer enough to drop in on our customers' lives every few months. We need to embed ourselves within them, empathetically and continuously.
That's what always on video research is about. A continuous approach that brings customer closeness into the everyday rhythm of a business, and shifts market research from occasional observer to continuous listener.
What is always on research?
Always on research is a way of staying connected to your customers on an ongoing basis. It's not a one-time project or a quarterly check-in. It's a sustained, scalable method for understanding consumers in the flow of their daily lives.
Three traits define the approach:
- Continuous engagement – a rolling dialogue with your audience, rather than a few large projects per year
- Real-time insight – responding to consumer behaviour as it happens, not six months after the fact
- Human-centred method – letting people share naturally, in their own time and their own space
When it's working well, always on research delivers empathy at scale. The customer becomes a living voice inside your organisation, not a data point in a quarterly report.
Why are videos central to this approach?
There are many ways to listen to customers. Videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts together offer something uniquely valuable: presence. They bring you into the customer's world – showing not just what they say, but how they live, feel, and decide.
In-the-moment multimedia submissions:
- Let participants express themselves in their own words and their own environments
- Capture facial expressions, tone, and mood – the nonverbal cues a transcript can't hold
- Offer layered context – background noise, the products on the shelf, the toddler interrupting a skincare routine
- Enable longitudinal observation – habits, motivations, and emotions as they change over time
Video is emotional. It's visceral. And when insight feels that real, teams listen.
How does always on research strengthen voice of customer?
Voice of Customer programmes have traditionally been dominated by numbers. Satisfaction scores, NPS, churn rates. These metrics are useful but impersonal. They describe, but they don't reveal.
Customer closeness is different. It's about emotional proximity – understanding the "why" behind the "what" and seeing customers as people, not consumers.
Always on video research lets organisations:
- Build a living library of customer experiences
- Bring real voices into decision-making at every level
- Break down silos by making insight accessible and shareable across teams
- Make customer empathy a daily habit, not an annual offsite theme
What are the common use cases?
Always on research suits any team that needs a steady stream of context-rich insight. Common applications include:
- Market research –real-time reactions to product prototypes, packaging, and customer journeys, feeding into product and marketing strategy
- UX and product design – observing how target users interact with new features, interfaces, or devices in their actual environment, revealing usability issues a lab setting would miss
- Brand strategy – understanding the emotional connection consumers have with your brand, with context-rich data on loyalty, perception, and sentiment
- Academic and social research – documenting cultural, societal, or behavioural dynamics in real-world contexts, bringing classroom and theoretical concepts to life through multimedia diaries
How does Indeemo support always on research?
Indeemo is built for continuous, in-context research. Participants use their smartphones to record short video entries, photos, screen recordings, and texts — any time, anywhere – and researchers work with that material through a single dashboard.
With Indeemo, you can:
- Recruit B2C and B2B participants in hours from a panel of 3 million+ respondents
- Capture real-life moments as they happen, in 30+ languages
- Track emotional and behavioural change over time through longitudinal studies
- Use generative AI for summarisation, translation, thematic analysis, and sentiment analysis to speed up analysis significantly
- Clip, tag, and share submissions so insights reach the boardroom, the design review, or the backlog refinement session
- Create subtitled highlight reels to share customer voice with stakeholders across the business
Why does this matter now?
Consumer behaviour is more dynamic than it's ever been. Trends emerge overnight. Context shifts routines. Loyalty is earned rather than assumed.
In that environment, passive or episodic listening doesn't work. Teams need insight that's timely, context-rich, authentic, and emotionally engaging. Always on research gives you that – not by asking customers to come to a lab, but by inviting researchers into the customer's life.
That level of proximity is what separates the brands that really understand their customers from the ones that only monitor them.
Do you need a big research team to run an always on programme?
No. Always on research is designed for ongoing, lighter-touch engagement rather than large infrequent studies. Even a small team can sustain a continuous programme once the cadence is in place.
If you have the ambition but not the in-house capacity, our Catalyst team can support you. Use the platform independently, or partner with us for study design, recruitment, moderation, and analysis. We can lend a helping hand whenever you need it.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between always on research and traditional voice of customer programmes? Traditional VoC programmes lean heavily on quantitative metrics (NPS, CSAT, churn) and episodic surveys. Always on research adds an ongoing qualitative stream – video, photo, and text submissions from participants in context – so you understand the why behind the numbers as well as the numbers themselves.
How many participants do you need for always on research? Fewer than you'd expect. Compelling insight can come from a small rolling panel of 15–30 participants contributing regularly, rather than a large one-off sample. The value is in the continuity, not the sample size in any single wave.
How long does an always on research programme typically run? It's ongoing by design. Individual studies inside the programme might run for a week or a month, but the programme itself is continuous. Some clients are into their third or fourth year of running always on research.
Can always on research replace surveys? It complements them rather than replacing them. Quantitative data still has a place for scale and benchmarking. Always on research adds the qualitative depth that surveys can't capture, so the two sit alongside each other.
Who inside an organisation benefits from always on research? Everyone who makes decisions about customers – product, marketing, UX, brand, insights, leadership, customer experience. One of the biggest advantages is making customer voice shareable across teams rather than siloed in a research department.
