Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Where's Your Customer?

We went to M&S at the weekend for a brew before the shopping, and the café had gone! The assistant told us it wasn't coming back, and that cafés in a lot of the smaller stores were closing. I assumed it was about money. When I looked into it, it turned out that's only half the story.

This week I look at what UK retailers are actually doing with shop floor space, and how you work out whether it earns its place.

• Why Sainsbury's closed 61 cafés and now has over 150 run by partners, including 50 Costa sites
• What Morrisons learned by taking out its meat and fish counters and then putting them back
• Why Gymshark gives up Regent Street floor space to free workout classes
• Five questions to ask about any part of your shop floor before you change it

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly if you've been through this decision yourself. What made you keep a space, or let it go?

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at wheresyourcustomer.com/43 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review; it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Stakeholder engagement in retail projects is difficult, and it's usually the part of the work with the least planning. Milestones and deliverables go on the project plan. But keeping people up to date as the work develops usually doesn't.

So the project keeps moving, and everyone else's understanding of it doesn't. The gap widens the longer the project runs, and it only becomes visible when you need something like approval, funding, or people to change how they work.

That's when the questions start. 

In this episode:

• Why late challenge is usually missing context, not resistance
• What the curse of knowledge does to the person who knows the project best
• Why sending more updates doesn't fix it
• Five questions that work better than a stakeholder list

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly if you've sat in a sign-off meeting and realised people hadn't kept up with the project.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/42 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

 

Currys is often described as one of the UK retailers leading on AI and retail technology. But a more useful story is the technology working behind the scenes: helping store managers act on data, giving repair engineers better information, and supporting colleagues in removing friction from the customer journey.

In this episode, I look at Currys as a retail technology case study and ask a more practical question: when does technology actually improve the customer experience?

What this episode covers:

• How Quorso helps store managers turn data into weekly actions
• What Currys' display-gap research reveals about customer assumptions and lost sales
• How video, repair data and connected service channels can support better customer outcomes
• A five-question framework for evaluating retail technology investment

Listen if you are thinking about:

• how to connect technology investment to customer experience
• how to make data more useful for store and service teams
• how to avoid starting with the tool before understanding the friction

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? 

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/41 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review; it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

 

Most retail and contact centre employees can tell when a customer needs more time, more patience or a different response. The more common problem is that they don't have the authority, time, or emotional capacity to act on it. This episode looks at what empowering frontline teams actually requires, and why average handling time, rigid scripts and centralised decision-making often work against the empathy already present in a team.

What this episode covers:

• Why average handling time is treated as an outdated measure but is still used to assess individual employees
• How Waterstones changed decision-making authority for its booksellers, and what happened to returns
• The research on surface acting, emotional labour and burnout in customer-facing roles
• Why fast checkout design, like Aldi's, is a legitimate response to what some customers want

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know where you see empathy getting squeezed out of the customer experience; is it by time, targets, policy, or something else?

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/40 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave me a review; it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

In this episode, I'm joined by Jacob Hinson, founder of eLocker, to explore why click and collect is still one of the most overlooked moments in the retail customer journey.

eLocker  provides smart locker technology for retail click and collect, returns, warehouses and workplace environments. Its technology is designed to make collections faster, clearer and easier to manage, helping retailers reduce manual processes, improve customer experience and lower the cost of collections and returns.

Together, we discuss why the online part of click and collect often works well, but the collection itself can still let the experience down. For customers, the journey does not end when the order is placed. If anything, the collection experience is where it should feel the most convenient, reliable and joined-up.

What this episode covers:

• Why customers judge the whole order by the collection experience, not just the checkout

• Why click and collect often falls between digital, operations and CX teams

• How better-designed collection points can improve satisfaction, repeat visits and cost per order

• Why perceived wait time can be just as important as actual wait time

• Practical first steps for retailers who want to improve collection before investing in new technology

Connect with Jacob and eLocker:

• Find out more about eLocker: https://www.elocker.com/

• Connect with Jacob Hinson on LinkedIn:Jacob Hinson

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing the online-to-store handover break down in your own collection or returns processes.

Get the full show notes and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/39

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Found this valuable? Please leave me a review. It helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would mean the world to me.

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer experience insights.

 

Most of the complexity in retail today ends up as work for the customer. It could be another app to download, another password to remember, another near-identical product to choose between. This episode is about reducing customer effort in retail; how the complexity builds up, why removing it rarely occurs to anyone, and what it takes to make buying feel simple again.

What this episode covers:

• Why complexity accumulates one reasonable decision at a time, and why nobody removes it
• The research showing people almost always add to solve a problem, and rarely think to subtract
• What Asda's range cuts and Topps Tiles' brand consolidation reveal about taking work off the customer
• The one question worth asking before launching anything: what does this ask the customer to do?

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing preventable service failures in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/38 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Most store performance reviews start and end with sales and costs. But a store's value goes well beyond that. From the online orders it fulfils to the supplier relationships it nurtures. In this episode, I look at everything else a store actually does that never gets counted, and what changes when you start looking at it.

In this one:

• Why store reviews default to sales, and what a 2019 accounting change had to do with it
• Four measurable sources of store value, from click-and-collect upsell to retail media margins
• The harder-to-measure roles like frontline insight, brand experience, resilience and more
• A practical way to widen how you review a store, whatever your budget

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know. Is there a role your own stores play that never makes it into a performance review?

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/10 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review; it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Staying customer-focused in retail over months and years is harder than it sounds. Priorities shift, budgets reset, and a piece of work everyone agreed mattered can suddenly fall off the priority list. Persistence is the skill that keeps customer focus alive through all of that, but should it be?

This episode covers:

• How most customer experience projects lose attention gradually 
• What the research says about persistence, and why it's needed right now
• The specific, uneven cost of staying customer-focused, and who's really carrying it
• What B&Q and Halfords show that organisations can reduce the weight of personal persistence by making more of the business customer-focused in the first place

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know whether you're currently the person re-making a case you thought you'd already won.

Thanks for listening!

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/36 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

How much of your working week is spent telling other people what customers said, rather than actually talking to one?

When you open your laptop on a completely ordinary Monday, you have four customer-related things open: a customer dashboard, a survey tool, a customer proposition deck you need to finish, and an email about a complaint.

 Not one of those four things is an actual conversation with an actual customer. That's the starting point for this episode: where the hours in a CX role actually go, and where AI can actually help you get some of them back.

What this episode covers:

• Why a "customer-focused" morning can involve zero real customer contact
• Three concrete places AI can save time: feedback theming, report drafting, and system upkeep
• Why the blocker to using AI well is often confidence, not access 
• What happens when the time you get back doesn't automatically go anywhere useful, and why that's on you to decide

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly if you've found a place in your own week where AI's already quietly taken something off your plate, or where you're still doing it all by hand.

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing preventable service failures in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/35 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review; it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer experience insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Most retail organisations run a Voice of the Customer (VOC) programme, which involves collecting customer feedback through surveys, reviews, complaints, or interviews.

Many also track operational and process data. Things like delivery times, stock availability, returns, and customer service performance.

Some also listen to staff through employee feedback, such as what frontline colleagues see and deal with every day.

But there's another type of insight that is now readily available: behavioural data. This is simply data about what customers actually do, not what they say. For example: what they click on, what they search for, what they abandon in their basket, what they buy, and how often they come back.

In many retail businesses, this kind of data sits with the digital or marketing team, and is mostly used to improve campaigns or user experience. It doesn't always make it into broader customer insight work.

In this episode, we look at how customer insight has moved from mainly asking people questions to also watching patterns in real behaviour. We explore what you can see when you combine the two and what it takes to get teams to look at the same evidence, rather than working separately.

What this episode covers:

• What the VOC, VOE, VOP framework asks, and what it can't see
• The behavioural footprint: what customers leave behind, and why it's now accessible to mid-market retailers
• The gap between executive confidence and customer reality and how behavioural data makes it visible
• Why Aldi's model complicates the insight engine argument and what that tells us

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know whether customer listening and watching are brought into the same conversation in your organisation, or whether they're still managed separately.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/34 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Most CX professionals know exactly what the customer would think about a decision being made in a planning meeting. Fewer say it out loud. Representing the customer in retail (not just collecting insights about them) but actively bringing their perspective into the room takes something that most CX role descriptions don't mention.

This episode explores where that something actually comes from.

This episode covers:

• Why specific, first-hand customer knowledge builds confidence to speak in a way that dashboard data doesn't
• What the Rotageek Talking Shop 2026 report reveals about customer insight failing to travel in retail organisations
• The role of self-belief and why knowing the customer and trusting yourself to say so are two different skills
• How sponsorship from a senior colleague can shift the internal calculation CX professionals make before speaking up

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, especially if you've found something that's helped you bring the customer's voice into a conversation where it was missing.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/33 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Most retail organisations have customer profiles. Many of those profiles were built a few years ago. They're approved, filed, and used ever since. Meanwhile, the customer has moved on. Hybrid working, for example, has changed shopping routines. The cost-of-living shift has changed how spending feels, not just what people can afford. And the research behind describing who the customer is today isn't always budgeted for now.

This episode explores why understanding retail customers is harder than it looks and why the gap between what a business thinks it knows and what is actually true tends to open gradually, without you noticing.

What this episode covers:

• Why customer profiles drift out of date and what makes it so easy to miss
• How staff turnover erodes the context and reasoning behind customer research, not just the people who did it
• Why satisfaction scores can end up replacing a genuine picture of the customer
• What frontline teams know that almost never makes it back to the centre

 

Thanks for Listening!

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/10 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Most of the conversation about AI in retail is happening between retailers.

What customers are actually saying when they hit an automated channel that can't resolve their problem, or notice that a recommendation feels less like service and more like surveillance, is quite different.

This episode looks at the specific line UK customers are drawing around AI and customer experience in retail, why that line is being crossed more often than retailers realise, and what it means for how CX teams manage insights alongside AI tools.

This episode covers:

• What YouGov and Mintel research shows about where UK customers actually trust AI and where they don't
• Why vulnerable customers are being failed by automated service channels, and why it's a design problem, not a technology one
• What AI insight tools are doing to the rhythm of qualitative customer research, and what gets lost in the shift
• How Bill Stinnett's Think Like Your Customer reframes the risk: AI always works from the past, thinking like your customer is a present-tense act

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly whether you're seeing the gap between what AI tells you about your customers and what you know from actually watching them.

Here's the link to episode 20, which examines whether surveys are still effective in Voice of the Customer programmes. And a link to episode 29, which looks at how inights get generated and why that matters as much as what you do with it.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/31 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Your customers are still visiting. Still swiping the loyalty card. Still appearing as retained in your data. But retail customer spending habits have changed and the spend that matters most is redistributing to competitors without you noticing. This episode explores why standard retention data creates a specific kind of false confidence, and what the fragmentation pattern actually looks like in practice.

What this episode covers:

• What loyalty schemes can and can't tell you about the share of wallet retail teams actually hold
• Why some fragmentation, particularly values-driven spend like resale, is structural, not fixable through better CRM or loyalty tactics
• What a small number of retailers appear to do differently to hold onto the spend that matters

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd particularly love to hear whether you recognise the gap between what your retention data shows and what you suspect is actually happening in your customers' wallets.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/30 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer experience challenges, please share this episode with them.

 

 

Most retail teams have more information than they know what to do with. The problem isn't the data; it's that data alone rarely shifts what happens in meetings or conversations with stakeholders. Customer storytelling in retail is the skill that closes that gap. Learn how to turn insight into something a room full of operational, commercial and digital priorities can actually act on.

This episode covers:

• Why NPS numbers organisations trust most may be telling an incomplete story, and what sentiment analysis of written customer comments reveals about the gap
• The six questions that structure both listening to customers and telling their story in a way that lands
• How the same customer illuminates different stakes for different audiences and why that matters for how you tell the story
• The three ways storytelling could go wrong internally, and the simple guardrails to prevent them

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know — particularly whether trying the six questions changes what happens when you bring customer evidence into a room.

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing preventable service failures in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/29 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

The moment an AI output stops being "something the tool suggested" and becomes your professional recommendation is easy to miss. This episode looks at that handover, when nobody double-checks, when a 'plausible' statistic almost ends up in a deck, and what it actually takes to know which outputs are reliable (rather than just hoping they are).

What this episode covers:

• Automation bias and why the risk arrives after practitioners feel comfortable with a tool
• The two types of task AI handles very differently: working with material you've provided versus generating from its own training data, and how the output looks identical either way
• What the ICO says about customer data in AI tools and what changes under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025
• Three questions to ask before opening the tool, with examples from M&S and John Lewis Partnership on how responsible AI deployment looks at scale

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know whether the three questions landed for you and whether any of this shifted how you're thinking about what you put your name on.

Here's the link to the ICO Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/28 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Most retail teams are using AI, but most are getting a fraction of what the tools can actually do.

The AI skills gap in retail isn't about access. It's about clear and consistent AI coaching. Without it, practitioners bring their own habits and ways of working to these tools. But those habits will underdeliver. A different approach is needed.

This episode covers:

• Why 89% of retail staff have never had formal AI coaching and the self-taught habits that leaves behind
• The Jagged Frontier: why AI's unpredictable capability profile causes people to retreat to low-value use cases
• What a well-constructed prompt actually contains, with a before-and-after from a real CX scenario
• Why customer experience professionals already have the core skills to prompt well 

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate from today? I'd love to know whether the prompting reframe felt like a reset for you, and if you try the before-and-after approach with something you're working on this week.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/27 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer experience challenges, especially learning how to use AI tools, please share this episode with them.

 

 

Most retailers know when a customer complains. The harder question is what happens when they don't. Customer disengagement in retail typically shows up not as a walkout but as a slow redistribution. Visits become less frequent, the basket shifts toward functional purchases, and the higher-value choices the customer used to make start appearing elsewhere. By the time the data flags anything, the drift is already well underway.

This episode covers:

• The "quiet quitting" pattern in retail and what research reveals about the gap between stated brand love and actual switching behaviour
• How wallet redistribution works, and why no single retailer can see the full picture of where the spend has gone
• The fundamental perception problem with most loyalty schemes and what Pets at Home's VIP Club does differently
• Why NPS and transaction data are structurally unable to detect identity drift, and what the Waterstones recovery suggests about addressing the actual cause

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know whether you're seeing signs of this kind of silent drift in your own organisation and whether the data is giving you the full picture.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/26 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

 

Every retail environment constantly produces identity signals through elements such as layout, lighting, staffing, technology, and pricing. Long before a customer looks at a product, they've already answered the question: is this place for me? This episode explores what produces that verdict and how most retail organisations have no one specifically responsible for asking what their store is actually saying.

This episode covers:

• How retail identity signals form in seconds, and the environmental psychology that explains why
• What layout and lighting communicate about who a store is for, with examples from B&Q, Fenwick Newcastle, All Saints and Lush
• Why the human moments (i.e. staff who see the customer) is the most powerful identity signal in physical retail
• The measurable identity and pricing impact of self-checkout, and what Booths chose instead
• Why crowding can signal belonging and what Primark's treasure hunt identity tells us about that
• Why identity signals accumulate by default when no one in the organisation owns the question

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know your thoughts about the effect retailers can have on customer identity.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/25 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer experience insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network works in retail and is interested in how shopping impacts your identity, please share this episode with them

 

There's a question every customer answers within seconds of walking through a retailer's door; is this place for me?

Most of the time they're not consciously aware they're answering it. But it shapes whether they stay, browse, buy, and come back. This episode explores the relationship between customer identity in retail and what actually drives loyalty over time. 

What this episode covers:

• Why customers aren't just buying products, they're buying a version of themselves
• How some retailers lend customers an identity they haven't quite grown into yet and why that's commercially significant
• What life-stage drift looks like, and how it rarely shows up as a complaint
• How economic pressure has created a new identity archetype and which retailers are keeping pace

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to hear whether you're noticing the identity dimension in your own customer data or, like most of us, you're working with tools that weren't built to see it.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/24 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

 

 

You spend time and effort improving a significant operational improvement programme. Queue times come down. Stock availability is consistent. Click-and-collect errors have more than halved. Every metric is moving in the right direction.

But then the quarterly customer comments come back — almost identical to the previous quarter. Have customers not even noticed your improvements? Customer perception in retail doesn't always follow the experience that's been built for it. The two systems are shaped by different conditions. And most organisations are only designing one of them.

What this episode covers:

• The four conditions that form customer perception (expectation, contrast, sequence, and human presence) and why they sit outside most CX design briefs
• Why getting it right has become the baseline, and what's actually moving satisfaction in UK retail right now
• How expectation-setting before a transaction changes what customers are willing to absorb when something goes wrong
• The difference between genuine perception design and using better framing to manage the optics of a poor experience

  Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know your thoughts on this. 

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/23 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review or some feedback; it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would really mean the world to me.

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer experience insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer experience challenges, please share this episode with them.

 

 

Most customer experience programmes begin with a clear vision of what the customer should experience.

What they rarely account for is everything that happens between that moment of design clarity and the shop floor on an ordinary Tuesday. Budget conversations trim the vision. Handoffs dilute the intent. Attrition carries seasoned voices out of the door.

The experience customers encounter is frequently not the one designed, and understanding why that gap opens (and where it opens) matters more than any individual design decision.

This episode covers:

• Why CX initiatives stall between design and delivery.
• The pilot purgatory pattern and the commercial pressures behind it
• How the handoff between design teams and frontline colleagues reshapes what gets delivered, and what changes when teams help shape their own part of the experience
• The role of attrition, improvisation, and workarounds in shifting designed standards over time
• The retail environments where experience design holds up consistently, and the structural conditions that make it possible

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know if you're seeing this gap in your own organisation, between what was designed and what customers actually encounter.

Get the full show notes at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/22

And I'd love it if you could complete my short listener survey, so I can keep improving these episodes for you.

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer experience challenges, please share this episode with them

 

There's a consistent two-point gap in the UK Customer Satisfaction Index between how customers in the North of England and Scotland rate their retail experiences and how customers in London rate theirs. It appears every year.

In this episode, I look at what's actually driving that regional customer experience gap and why the usual explanation (regional warmth, a friendlier culture up North) is incomplete.

If the gap is about culture, there's nothing you can do with it operationally. But if it's about team tenure, footfall density, and the expectation customers arrive with before you've done anything, then there are levers we can work with.

I also look at what the Amazon Fresh experiment tells us about the limits of frictionless retail, and why the Manchester in:Five format has survived so far. 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing preventable service failures in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/21

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

 

 

UK retailers are asking for feedback more than ever. Response rates are falling. And only around 30% of businesses act on what they collect. In episode 20, I'm looking at what's going on inside most voice-of-the-customer programmes right now and whether the tools we're using match what we say we want to understand.

This episode covers the capture rate problem (Forrester puts it at 2–7%), why what you do capture may not be as reliable as it looks, the UK cultural scoring bias that distorts NPS dashboards, Goodhart's Law in retail, the gap between listening and acting, how AI-driven passive listening is reshaping the picture, and the contexts where structured feedback still earns its place.

I value your opinion

I started Where's Your Customer? because I kept having conversations with retail leaders who were asking the same questions I was. About customers. About who they really are and what drives them to purchase things. About how we're measuring that. About the gap between the data we have and the picture it paints.

I didn't want to make a show that told people what to do. I wanted to make one that made us think differently.

I'm not entirely sure I've always got that balance right.

So I'm asking: if you listen (or read these show notes pages), what's actually landing? What do you find yourself coming back to? And, what do you want more of?

I've put together a short survey to gather your thoughts so far. Would you mind completing it please?

It'll only take about two minutes. Thanks so much!

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing preventable service failures in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/20

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

You've been in that meeting, where you've walked in with a clear customer problem, done the work, and watched the questions come back about cost, ROI, and timeline. Nothing about the experience at all.

In this episode, I'm thinking about the gap between how CX teams talk about customer problems and how leadership evaluates investment. It's not a belief gap. It's a translation problem.

And in 2026, with UK retail facing significant cost pressures, the approval bar for CX investment has moved.

I look at what operational metrics tend to carry more weight in business cases than satisfaction scores alone, why Curry's and Morrisons named customer experience as a commercial driver in their recent results, and the three commercial mechanisms that tend to appear in the cases that do get approved.

I also sit with a question I find uncomfortable: what happens to the human side of CX when every route to approval runs through efficiency language?

If you've got a CX Improvement proposal sitting in your drafts folder, this one's for you.

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, especially your thoughts about the human side of CX in these investment discussions.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/19 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is making a business case for customer experience, please help them out by sharing this episode with them.

 

 

What if the service level your customers expect has very little to do with what they're spending?

In this episode, I'm joined by Dan Cuomo, a leader who's led marketing and operations across Wickes, Bath Store, Signet, and now Wheels Up (private aviation). That's a career that spans the full length of what luxury retail customer experience can mean, from a £20 transaction to a £20,000 one.

What Dan's noticed across it all is that price is a surprisingly unreliable guide to what's actually at stake for the customer. Emotional investment is the better measure and that doesn't always follow the invoice value.

We talk about the invisible voices customers carry into their purchasing decisions (the partners, the friends, the Instagram saves). We get into what happens to service design when operations stop being the delivery side of things and become the experience itself. And Dan is honest about what transfers across all those sectors, and what really doesn't.

There's also a very honest account of what service recovery looks like at three in the morning when a private flight hits a problem, and why the customers who forgive those moments are the ones who felt you were already talking to them before they had to call you.

Thanks for Listening!

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's one insight you're planning to put into practice, or one thing you're taking away from the conversation with Dan?

Let's connect: find me on LinkedIn

Connect with Dan Cuomo on LinkedIn

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/18 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network could benefit from today's conversation, please pass it on.

 

 

When customers describe a good retail experience, the language is rarely spectacular.

Instead, they say 'it was easy'. 'Quick'. 'I got what I came for'. 'I'd go back'.

That's the language of something working consistently and seamlessly in the background. 

So in this episode, I've been thinking about what's underneath those experiences. Not what great retail customer experience looks like on the surface, but the conditions that make it possible and what happens when those conditions start to degrade under cost and complexity pressure.

I've pulled out 5 conditions: Orientation, Clarity, Momentum, Trust, and Continuity.

Orientation covers what happens in the very first moments of any retail encounter, and how the decompression zone affects dwell time and initial capture.

Clarity looks at decision confidence and the counterintuitive research showing that reducing choices can actually increase satisfaction and spend.

Momentum covers the friction that kills transactions, including the £38 billion lost by UK retailers to basket abandonment in 2024, alongside Barclays Partner Finance's research on 'positive friction' that builds confidence rather than eroding it.

Trust examines the link between frontline conditions and customer loyalty and why you can't communicate your way into credibility.

Continuity addresses what happens after the purchase, including ParcelLab's finding that 80% of UK retailers stop communicating with customers once a parcel is dispatched.

What connects all five is a measurement question. Most retail organisations have metrics for what's visible. Far fewer have a reliable way to notice when a condition is degrading before the numbers start to move.

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing these conditions showing up in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/17

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network works in retail customer experience, please share this episode with them

 

 

In 2016, I was studying for my customer experience professional qualification and filling a little red book with notes. Six core competencies. Frameworks. Models. The language of CX. I loved every bit of it.

Ten years on, I still use those foundations. But the list of what a CX leader needs to understand has grown considerably, and I keep wondering whether what we're describing is still one role, or whether it's become several.

In this episode, I look at what's changed around customer experience leadership: the economic pressure, the rise of AI as infrastructure rather than experiment, and the way experience decisions are increasingly being made in technology programmes and commercial planning, often before the CX function is even in the room.

I look at what's happening in UK retail specifically, examples from John Lewis, M&S, Tesco, Next, Boots, Currys, and Sainsbury's, and what the pattern across all of them suggests about where CX capability is actually being built right now.

And I sit with the tension at the heart of all of this: whether the expanding brief is a sign that the role is under strain, or a sign that it's finally being taken seriously. Both readings are probably true somewhere.

This isn't an episode with conclusions. It's one worth thinking through.

 

 

Thanks for Listening!

If this episode resonates with you, I'd love to connect and hear your thoughts about how Customer Experience leadership is changing.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/16 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave me a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me.

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

When Retail Teams Play, Experiences Come Alive

There's something you notice in retail environments that work. The experience feels alive. Responsive. Like the people behind it had permission to actually think.

In this episode, I've been sitting with a question about what separates those experiences from the ones that feel flat - ok, but mechanical. And I think it might be whether teams have been allowed to play.

Not play in a frivolous sense. Play in the sense of having room to experiment, to try things that might not work, to respond to what's actually in front of them rather than following the script.

I look at what's happening at Lego, Hamleys, and Selfridges (retailers who've made experience design part of their operating model) and explore Greg McKeown's argument that play isn't a cultural nice-to-have but a genuine strategic advantage. I also sit with the harder question: whether retail's relentless focus on optimisation is gradually removing the very conditions that produce experiences customers actually remember. And I try to be honest about the counterargument too, because this isn't straightforward.

I don't have a tidy answer. But I think it's worth paying attention to.

  Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing preventable service failures in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/15 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

When did sitting in your car too exhausted to go inside become normal?

If you've ever finished a full day and realised you spent it responding to everything whilst thinking about nothing, you're not alone. Retail manager burnout has reached crisis levels, with happiness across UK retail falling to 58% in 2025.

In this episode, I explore:

• Where your time actually disappears to (spoiler: it's not where you think)
• Why retail managers lose 5-8 hours per week just documenting work instead of doing it
• The structural shift that's dropped manager happiness 11% in three months (below their teams for the first time ever)
• How retail crime is adding invisible weight to every decision you make

Four things steadier retail managers do differently:

• Stop carrying decisions that aren't theirs
• Have someone outside their organisation who genuinely understands
• Protect their mental bandwidth (using "not yet" instead of "no")
• Stop performing certainty when they're still working things out

Where technology can actually help: voice transcription, automated reporting, AI-flagged patterns, not to do more, but to create thinking space.

One practical step: Track just one day this week (a 'normal' workday). Not to judge yourself, but to see where your time goes. Then ask: if I could give one hour back to myself, where would I want it to go?

Because retail manager burnout isn't something you solve with a podcast episode. But you might notice one pattern. One place where your attention is going that it doesn't need to. And that might be enough to shift something.

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're losing or reworking thinking time in your calendar.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/14 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

I was reading an interview with B&Q's retail director about their showroom upgrades. Beautiful bathroom and kitchen displays, scent diffusers, and aspirational spaces designed to lift the customer experience.

But what caught my attention was their two-entrance strategy, appealing to customers who were NOT interested in the showroom spaces. 

On the surface, it's practical. But I think it reveals something deeper: customers change as they move through their projects. Someone covered in door dust, midway through a DIY job, needs something different from someone in the dreaming stage, browsing inspiration.

The separate entrance acknowledges this. Same retailer, same goal, but different intelligence for different moments.

That's what this episode explores. How two different channels (physical stores and online shopping) have developed their own ways of reading customers, and how most of the time, these two sides don't know what the other one sees.

6 Patterns I've Noticed

Nudges vs Feeling: Online uses behavioural economics to guide decisions. Scarcity messages, social proof, AI recommendations. But in physical stores, the intelligence is different. It's whether someone covered in plaster dust feels like they belong.

Pattern vs Presence: John Lewis generates 100 million outfit combinations per night through AI. Lush gives staff freedom to hand over a product if someone's having a bad day. Both are personalisation, one at scale, one in a single moment.

Intent vs Hesitation: 75% of UK shoppers say sizing feels inconsistent online, so they order multiple sizes. That hesitation costs UK retailers £34.4 billion per year in basket abandonment. Currys addressed this with Shop Live, connecting online shoppers with store experts via video chat.

Friction as Failure vs Care: Online shoppers abandon a site if checkout takes more than 3 seconds. But in physical stores, we'll queue for nearly 6 minutes. IKEA's self-assembly isn't efficient, but that effort is what makes you value the furniture.

Path vs Memory: We remember the peak and the end of an experience, not the average. IKEA's ice cream stand at the exit rewrites the whole trip. Digital retail usually ends with an order confirmation page.

Ignite vs Validate: TikTok Shop became the UK's 4th-largest beauty retailer in 2024. Trends ignite online, but physical stores are where the spark gets tested.

Two kinds of intelligence working in the same organisation. 

What if you got curious about what the other channel already knows?

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? 

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/13 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me.

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network works in Customer Experience or Retail, and you think these insights would help them, please share this episode. 

 

Bury Market generated £1.1 million in annual surplus by staying traditional while others added wine bars and craft beer. Now they're building a £33 million Flexi Hall. What happens when you finally follow the playbook everyone else is using?

While Crewe, Altrincham and several other town markets have transformed into food halls, Bury Market has remained the same. 150,000 weekly visitors. 70% of customers have been coming for over a decade. No Instagram moments. Just a traditional market. 

But demographic reality has caught up. Their core customer base is ageing, and in autumn 2026 their new Flexi Hall will open to younger crowds.

In this episode, I explore what Bury Market protected while everyone else transformed, the 10-minute queue that built customer loyalty nobody else valued, and the uncomfortable question facing every retail professional: when following the obvious route means losing what made you valuable in the first place.

Key Topics:
- Why Bury Market stayed traditional while competitors modernized
- The friction that creates customer loyalty vs. the friction that kills it
- Coach tourism strategy nobody else wanted
- Demographic reality no amount of loyalty can solve
- What "retailtainment while retaining independent spirit" means

 

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know. Do you love a market too?

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/12 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Are smaller retailers winning the AI race?

While 99% of large UK retailers have AI expertise in-house, 31% of small retailers are already using AI daily. The competitive advantage isn't about resources, it's about friction, proximity, and speed of testing.

I've been learning about AI at quite a pace recently, and it made me wonder: if individuals can move this quickly, what does that mean for smaller retailers?

The AI Adoption Paradox

Having AI expertise isn't the same as using AI day to day. One group has resources and roadmaps. The other has the freedom to test on Tuesday and see results by Wednesday.

Examples That Show the Pattern

Virgin Wines removes wine selection uncertainty by matching sensory attributes to individual preferences.

Abelini, an independent Hatton Garden jeweller, uses AR/AI so customers can see how rings look on their own hands.

ListAid helps charity shop volunteers price donations accurately in under a minute.

Finney's in Aberdeen makes three generations of jewellery expertise accessible through digital tools.

Happy and Glorious in Canterbury uses AI for admin tasks, freeing time for customer work.

The pattern? AI sits right next to decisions - customer decisions and colleague decisions. That proximity matters because when AI is close to the decision, outcomes change quickly.

Why Proximity Wins

In larger organisations, AI often lives deeper in infrastructure - optimising systems, forecasting demand. That work matters, but it's further from the moments where customers hesitate or teams feel unsure.

Smaller retailers have fewer layers between problem and solution. They notice issues sooner, test faster, keep what works, drop what doesn't. That ability to connect problem, experiment, and outcome is where the advantage lies.

Journey Mapping Reveals Use Cases

When you look closely at your customer journey (into the detail of what actually happens) friction points stand out. Those are moments where people hesitate, teams second-guess, or customers disappear. Once you see those moments clearly, AI use cases become obvious.

Your AI plan doesn't need to run the whole business. It needs to support decisions causing friction for customers and colleagues. Tackle things moment by moment - that's your roadmap.

The Real Advantage

The competitive advantage isn't about AI. It's about noticing where customers hesitate, where staff feel anxious, where you're losing time. It's having the freedom to do something about it quickly.

The difference shows up when technology supports real decisions. When it helps someone choose with confidence. When it removes guesswork from pressured moments. When it gives people time to focus on what matters.

That's when AI has impact. That's when it gives you a competitive advantage.

Thanks for Listening!

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/11

Need help with customer journey mapping? Let's chat.

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – Please help share this podcast with other retail professionals who might find it useful. 

 

UK retail customer service hit a 14-year low in 2024. But is the problem really about better recovery, or is it about prevention?

In this episode, I share a personal story about three trips to fix a basic mistake, then examine the £7.3 billion monthly cost of preventable service failures across UK retail.

We look at why UK employees spend 20% of their time fixing problems that shouldn't have happened, explore the real sources of service failures (it's not what you think), and examine two retailers who've figured out prevention: Sainsbury's with 5% voluntary turnover, and Timpson with their two-rule approach to customer service.

In this episode:

• Why brilliant service recovery still loses 50-70% of customers
• The turnover quality spiral nobody talks about 
• Three patterns for preventing failures: systems design, measuring what matters, and technology that prevents
• How to redirect recovery spending toward prevention
• What Saturday afternoon looks like in prevention mode vs crisis mode

Key insight: When a customer encounters even one service problem, satisfaction drops 20 points. We've got brilliant at recovery, but recovery happens after the damage is done. The retailers seeing sustained improvement aren't getting better at fixing things. They're redesigning systems so things don't break in the first place.

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, particularly where you're seeing preventable service failures in your own organisation.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/10 

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Found this valuable? Please leave a review, it helps other retail professionals discover these conversations and would honestly mean the world to me

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit WheresYourCustomer.com  for more customer service insights and resources.

Share this with someone who needs it – If someone in your network is wrestling with customer service challenges, please share this episode with them

 

Customers don't search the way they used to. They start on TikTok, or Instagram, ask ChatGPT for recommendations, or head straight to Amazon without even thinking about your website.

 

In this episode, I talk with Paul Culshaw, a strategist with over 25 years in SEO who's worked with major UK retailers, including Littlewoods and N Brown. Paul reveals why retail SEO strategy isn't really about search engines anymore. It's about understanding how people make decisions, where they go for information, and what builds their trust.

 

We explore:

 

- How customer discovery has fragmented across platforms (and why that matters for category managers) - The multi-visit buyer journey and what content you need at each stage - Why SEO is actually customer experience, not just a technical marketing channel - Category page optimisation as a practical starting point - EE-A-T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) and why reviews matter more than ever - How to get buy-in from teams who don't care about search - The four biggest mistakes retailers make with SEO - Why AI-driven discovery is the opportunity right now (think October 1998 for the internet)

 

If you've been treating SEO as someone else's problem, this conversation will change how you think about customers and product discovery.

 

Guest: Paul Culshaw

 

Paul Shaw is a certified business strategist and AI integration specialist who's spent 25 years in online marketing. He's worked in-house with Littlewoods Shop Direct, N Brown (JD Williams, Simply Be), and agency-side with clients across retail. He now helps businesses prepare for AI-driven discovery through his Authority Engine framework.

 

Connect with Paul: - Website: https://www.paulculshaw.com/ - Instagram: @CoachPaulCulshaw

 

Thanks for Listening!

 

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation about retail SEO strategy? I'd love to know.   Get the full show notes with all the links and resources at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/9     Let's connect – Find me on Linkedinlinkedin.com/in/jo-williams-ccxp   Never miss an episode – Subscribe to Where's Your Customer? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.   Found this valuable? Please leave a review. It helps other retail professionals discover these conversations.   Share the knowledge – If someone in your network could benefit from rethinking their approach to search, please share this episode with them.  

Something shifts when you step back from work, doesn't it?

Last summer, I had my first child, and whilst I knew maternity leave would be transformative personally, I didn't expect it to reshape the customer experience lessons I'd carry forward in my career.

Between feeds and nappies, I found pockets of time to read nine customer experience books. What struck me wasn't just the individual insights, but the patterns emerging between them. I found Customer experience lessons that most of us know but struggle to act on consistently.

The 9 Customer Experience Lessons

Lesson 1: Reactive Customer Experience Is Already Too Late. Most businesses wait for customers to complain before taking action. But those winning customer loyalty build intelligence into operations so they can act before problems become customer problems.

Lesson 2: Culture Beats Strategy Every Time. Your culture determines CX, not your strategy. Employees need authority to solve problems in the moment.

Lesson 3: Customer Understanding Requires Discipline, Not Just Data. Having data isn't the same as understanding customers. Real insight comes from weaving together feedback, personas, and journey mapping.

Lesson 4: Customer Journey Maps Are Worthless Without Action. Beautiful maps become wall art without clear decisions and committed action. Know what your map will change before you create it.

Lesson 5: Excellence Lives in the Basics. Great Customer Experiences aren't built on surprise and delight tactics, they're created through consistency and removing friction from fundamental operations.

Lesson 6: Metrics Follow Experience, Not the Other Way Round. Fix the experience and metrics improve. Chase metrics and you often make experiences worse.

Lesson 7: Customers Decide With Emotion, Then Justify With Logic. Emotional triggers matter more than feature comparisons. Reduce cognitive effort rather than adding functionality.

Lesson 8: Physical Spaces Shape Behaviour. Every design choice influences how customers feel and act. Your environment tells a story, make sure it's the right one.

Lesson 9: CX Is Built in Everyday Moments. Customer loyalty is determined by small interactions: answered phones, kept promises, empowered teams who care.

What Connects These Customer Experience Lessons

These customer experience lessons reveal that CX isn't about tactics or technology, it's about people. Understanding customers deeply, empowering teams, and getting basics right consistently.

My Reading List

The nine books behind these customer experience lessons:

1. The New Customer Experience Management - Ivaylo Yorgov
2. The Customer of the Future - Blake Morgan
3. Store Design and Visual Merchandising - Claus Ebster & Marion Garaus
4. Creating a CX That Sings - Jennifer L. Clinehens
5. The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences - Matt Watkinson
6. Customers Know You Suck - Debbie Levitt
7. Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy - Phil Barden
8. Customer Understanding - Annette Franz
9. Moments of Truth - Jan Carlzon

Get the full show notes with all research sources and detailed insights at wheresyourcustomer.com/8

Thanks for Listening!

Which of these customer experience lessons resonated most with you? I'd love to know.

Subscribe for more – Don't miss future episodes! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Please leave a review – If you found value in this episode, a quick review helps other retail professionals discover these conversations too.

Connect with me – Find me on LinkedIn or visit whereyourcustomer.com for more customer experience resources and insights.

 

I don't know about you, but I've always got a job list on top of my day job list. Little things like booking eye tests, picking up paint samples, or nipping to the supermarket because you've run out of Calpol. I love it when I'm on a mission in a shop and everything just works. But then there's the flip side, when you can't find what you want, there's no one around to help, or worse, you finally decide on something only to find it's out of stock.

I needed something from the pharmacy recently, so I nipped out to Asda in my lunch break. Guess what? It was closed for lunch - when people actually need a pharmacy. It got me thinking about how some retailers aren't understanding what's going on in their customers' lives and how they're either supporting their experiences or disrupting them.

What We Cover in This Episode

My 5-Stage Customer Journey Framework. Most journey mapping starts when customers first interact with your brand. I prefer starting earlier, with the customer's actual need. My framework covers: the need trigger, planning the shop, going shopping, the purchase, and usage.

Running Effective Workshops. The magic happens when you bring the right people together with clear objectives. I love facilitating these workshops; they're creative, observational, and analytical all at the same time.

Essential Mapping Terms. Touchpoints, pain points, moments of truth, and emotional potential. Understanding these four elements helps you create maps that actually drive results.

Common Mistakes to Avoid. I've seen teams make the same mistakes repeatedly. Don't overcomplicate it, don't ignore the data, don't forget post-purchase, and remember you're creating a customer journey map, not a process map.

Quick Wins That Work. You don't need a complete transformation to see results. Small changes like simplified checkouts or clearer signage often create surprisingly big improvements.

A Retailer's Lesson

The Body Shop noticed mobile traffic growing but sales lagging. Instead of accepting that mobile customers just browse, they mapped the actual mobile experience. What they found was interesting. Customers wanted to buy, but the navigation was too confusing. Once they fixed those pain points, they saw a 28% increase in year-on-year orders.

That's the power of really understanding and improving the points in your customer's experience.

Key Takeaways

• Start journey maps with customer needs, not brand interactions. This reveals insights traditional lifecycle mapping misses
• Successful workshops need clear objectives, customer-facing team members, real data, and a consistent customer perspective
• You're building layers: actions, thoughts, emotions, touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities
• Common mistakes include overcomplicating, ignoring data, forgetting post-purchase, and slipping into process mapping
• Small changes often deliver surprisingly big improvements in customer satisfaction
• Journey mapping isn't one and done - successful retailers revisit maps regularly

Resources Mentioned

• The Body Shop mobile optimisation case study
• Digital mapping tools: Miro and Lucidchart for remote teams
• Customer journey mapping workshop templates

Get Customer Journey Mapping Support

If you're struggling and want some help creating a customer journey map in your business, I'd love to help you. Visit wheresyourcustomer.com/cjm for more details, and you can book a call with me.

Thanks for Listening!

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? 

Get the full show notes with all the links and resources mentioned at wheresyourcustomer.com/7

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Please leave a review – If you found value in this episode, a quick review would help other retail professionals discover these conversations.

Connect with me – Visit wheresyourcustomer.com for more customer experience resources and tips.

What Department Stores Teach Us About Customer Experience

Last week I found myself in Darlington with time to spare, wandering into a House of Fraser that felt tired and unloved. Sitting in their quiet cafe, mostly surrounded by pensioners, I couldn't stop thinking about how different these places used to feel when I'd visit them with my nan.

Department stores used to feel magical. Someone had curated what deserved your attention. Staff knew their departments inside out. You could discover something unexpected wandering from cosmetics to homeware to fashion. There was trust, too. They stood behind what they sold.

So what went wrong? And more importantly, what can the survivors teach us about creating customer experiences that actually work?

The research tells a stark story. In 2003, Debenhams was loaded with £1.2 billion of debt after a private equity buyout. Refurbishment spending plummeted by 77%. Meanwhile, John Lewis invested £800 million in their stores and tripled profits. The difference? One extracted value, the other created it.

What We Cover in This Episode

• The real reasons beloved department stores collapsed (hint: it wasn't just online competition)
• How private equity's asset-stripping approach destroyed Debenhams, BHS, and House of Fraser
• Why John Lewis invested £800 million and tripled profits whilst competitors failed
• Selfridges' "sensorial experience" strategy that online shopping can't replicate
• Harvey Nichols' "large boutique" approach that jumped them from 21st to 3rd in customer experience rankings
• Six strategies every retail business needs to create experiences customers actually want

The Department Store Landscape Today

Some department stores haven't collapsed dramatically - they've just faded. House of Fraser shrank from 59 stores to just 14. Kendall's in Manchester, that beautiful Art Deco building locals still call by its original name, faces conversion to offices after years of closure threats.

These stores still open their doors each day. Staff still turn up. Customers still browse the aisles. But everyone seems to be going through the motions. They've stopped listening to customers. They've stopped evolving.

Meanwhile, the survivors show us exactly what works.

Six Strategies That Create Winning Customer Experiences 1. Choose Your Lane and Own It

Harvey Nichols chose the large boutique experience. Selfridges chose sensory overload. John Lewis chose brilliant fundamentals. Each made a clear choice about who they serve and how. None tried to be everything to everyone.

2. Create Destinations, Not Just Distribution Points

Successful stores host workshops, exclusive events, and create genuine reasons to visit beyond buying products. They integrate hospitality - cafes, spaces to breathe, places to spend time. John Lewis is testing cookery schools with Jamie Oliver and rooftop bars.

3. Make Technology Serve Human Connection

Smart mirrors, AI recommendations, and mobile payments are just expected now. But the magic happens when technology helps your team serve customers better. Harvey Nichols connects online browsers with in-store experts through video chat.

4. Develop Experience Facilitators

The best stores evolve their people from checkout operators to consultants and problem solvers. They use customer insights to help staff create moments of discovery and delight.

5. Become Part of Your Community's Fabric

Support local causes, create shared experiences, and strengthen social connections around your location. Stores that become integral to local life earn loyalty that pure transaction can't buy.

6. Perfect the Physical-Digital Dance

Customers don't shop online or offline anymore - they do both simultaneously. Click and collect must work flawlessly. Real-time inventory needs visibility across every channel.

Key Takeaways

• Department store failures weren't caused by online competition alone - they were caused by extracting value instead of creating it
• John Lewis, Selfridges, and Harvey Nichols each chose different strategies, but all invested in customer experience
• The stores that survived defined their unique value proposition and stuck to it
• Technology should enhance human connections, not replace them
• Creating destinations rather than distribution points earns customer loyalty
• These lessons apply to any retail business, not just department stores

Resources Mentioned

• Centre for Retail Research - UK retail closure and job loss statistics
• John Lewis Partnership - £800 million store investment programme and profit growth
• Harvey Nichols - 360-degree service proposition and customer experience rankings
• Selfridges - "sensorial experience" philosophy and store transformation
• House of Fraser decline - from 59 stores down to 14

What's Next?

The magic hasn't disappeared from retail. It just needs redefining for how we live today.

Think about your own customer experience strategy: When did you last examine whether what you're offering still matters to the people you serve? When did you last invest in getting better rather than just maintaining what you have? What magic could you create that nobody else offers?

Found This Valuable?

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Complete show notes and resources: https://wheresyourcustomer.com/6

The most customer-focused retail leaders aren't waiting for formal AI training. They're building their own AI literacy to serve customers better, and you can too.

If you've been seeing posts about AI transforming retail, hearing colleagues mention ChatGPT, or watching competitors get smarter with AI, you're not alone. Spending on AI technologies in retail is projected to reach $85 billion by 2032, with 78% of organisations globally now using AI in some form.

Right now, individual professionals are learning faster than their companies are rolling out formal training programs. When your company does start deploying AI more broadly (and they will), you want to be the person who can guide those decisions thoughtfully.

What We Cover in This Episode

• What AI literacy really means for customer-focused retail leaders (it's not about becoming a tech expert)
• A practical 4-week learning roadmap you can start today
• How to experiment with AI tools safely whilst respecting company guidelines
• Why AI literacy makes you a better customer-focused leader
• Real examples of how retail professionals are using AI to serve customers better

Your 4-Week AI Learning Roadmap Phase 1: Understanding AI Fundamentals (Week 1)

Download ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and spend 15 minutes daily having general conversations. Get comfortable with how these tools think and respond. Learn basic vocabulary like prompts, hallucinations, and context.

Phase 2: Work-Adjacent Experiments (Week 2)

Create hypothetical customer scenarios and test AI responses. Practice with public information only. Try different types of requests to build intuition about what these tools excel at.

Phase 3: Real Work Challenges (Week 3)

Pick one recurring challenge; analysing feedback, meeting prep, or drafting communications for example. Use AI as a thinking partner whilst maintaining human judgment and decision-making.

Phase 4: Building Team Awareness (Ongoing)

Start conversations with your team about AI experiments. Share learnings in team meetings. Model responsible experimentation for others to follow.

Key Takeaways

• AI literacy for retail professionals means understanding what these tools can and can't do, not becoming a tech expert
• You can build AI skills responsibly without formal training or breaking company rules
• The goal is to become a bridge between technology possibilities and customer needs
• Leaders with AI literacy can spot opportunities, ask better questions, and guide change thoughtfully
• Professional AI tools (£20/month) are worth the investment for serious skill-building

Resources Mentioned

• ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini AI tools
• ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Gemini Advanced (paid versions)
• Stanford AI Index Report on global AI adoption rates
• Forbes' research on generative AI workplace usage

What's Next?

Start with one small experiment this week. Download an AI tool on your phone and spend 10-15 minutes daily getting familiar with it. Don't overthink it, just start building familiarity whilst keeping customers at the centre of everything you learn.

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Tired of staring at customer data that tells you nothing useful?

I've created "10 AI Shortcuts for Understanding Your Customers" specifically for retail professionals who know their data holds answers but don't have time to become data scientists.

Download your free guide at wheresyourcustomer.com/ai-shortcuts and start making sense of your customer insights today. 

 

Walking into leadership meetings with glowing NPS scores only to face questions about declining repeat purchases? Most retail teams measure customer experience as if it were still 2015, celebrating snapshots whilst missing the complex omnichannel reality customers actually live in. In this episode, Jo shares four business-critical CX metrics that connect directly to revenue and give you predictive power. Perfect for retail professionals, CX managers, and marketers who need to prove ROI to skeptical leadership teams.   What You'll Learn: • Why Customer Effort Score predicts churn better than NPS • How First Contact Resolution drives both trust and efficiency • Why Customer Lifetime Value transforms CX from cost centre to profit driver • How to build predictive dashboards that spot problems before they hit your bottom line Key Takeaways ✓ Customer Effort Score (CES) - Your friction detection system that predicts churn more accurately than traditional metrics ✓ First Contact Resolution (FCR) - Target 85%+ to build trust whilst reducing operational costs by up to 16% ✓ Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - Show leadership how CX improvements increase CLV by 15% to transform budget conversations ✓ Customer Loyalty Index - Measure what customers actually do with their wallets, not just what they say ✓ Leading indicators matter - Watch channel switching patterns and employee sentiment to predict problems before they affect your bottom line Episode Highlights [02:00] Why traditional CX metrics fail in omnichannel retail [04:15] The four metrics that predict business success [08:36] Real story: Why dealer relationships mattered more than CSAT at Jacuzzi [11:15] Tesco case study: Using weather data to predict behaviour (40% sales increase) [13:45] The hidden metric: How employee experience predicts customer satisfaction Resources Mentioned

• Gartner research: CX drives 66% of customer loyalty
• Forrester findings on customer experience ROI
• McKinsey data on retention vs acquisition costs
• Retail X research on customer switching behaviour

Your Weekly Challenge Pick one metric from today's episode that you're not currently tracking. Set up basic measurement (even if it's manual) and start building your early warning system. Consider tracking customer effort scores for your checkout process or monitoring channel switching patterns. Start small, but start now. In six months, you'll either have predictive insights or you'll be dealing with problems after they've already hurt your customers. Connect & Subscribe Full show notes:wheresyourcustomer.com/4 Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and wherever you listen to podcasts Review: If you found value in today's episode, please leave a review. It really helps Jo reach other retail professionals like you, so they can discover these strategies too.

 

Behind every metric is a person trying to be understood. Go find them.

The customer loyalty strategy landscape is experiencing a seismic shift. The loyalty market is projected to reach £4 billion by 2029, but brand loyalty is eroding. In this episode, Jo explores why 45% of customers are abandoning beloved brands for cheaper alternatives and what industry leaders like Boots, ASDA, and McDonald's are doing to build connections instead of just collecting points. Perfect for retail marketers, operations managers, and CX professionals who suspect their loyalty programme optimisation is stuck in 2015. What You'll Learn • Why traditional loyalty programmes are failing - Discover the uncomfortable truth about discount habits vs. genuine loyalty • How AI is transforming customer retention - Learn from Boots' life-stage personalisation that increases engagement by 40% • The omnichannel trust factor - Why 76.6% of customers switch brands after just one poor delivery experience • Gamification that works - ASDA's mission-based approach and McDonald's enduring Monopoly success • Building trust through data transparency - How brands earn permission to personalise experiences Key Takeaways The Loyalty Paradox: Growing market (£2.56B to £4B by 2029) but declining brand loyalty Personalisation that matters: Boots uses life-stage data to serve relevant content and products, not just discounts Gamification evolution: ASDA's missions turn shopping into achievements; McDonald's Monopoly celebrates customer choice Trust through transparency: Explaining data use in human language generates higher opt-in rates The real shift: From keeping customers to becoming the kind of brand customers want to keep Featured Brands & Examples • Boots - Life-stage personalisation and data transparency • ASDA - Mission-based rewards programme innovation • McDonald's - Monopoly campaign mastery • Nectar - Customer education and security awareness • H&M - Aspirational loyalty with status and community Key Statistics • 81% of customers worried about finances (McKinsey) • 45% switching to own-label alternatives • AI-driven personalisation increases engagement 40% (Eagle Eye/Retail X) • 76.6% switch brands after one poor delivery experience • £19 million built up in ASDA cash pots since launch Questions for Reflection

1. Are you building relationships or just managing transactions?
2. Are communications based on what matters to customers now or what they bought last week?
3. Is every touchpoint designed to build trust or just complete transactions?
4. Are you creating spaces for customers to connect with your brand's values?

Next Steps Pick one small experiment for next week:

• Personalise email subject lines based on purchase patterns
• Follow up after delivery to ensure satisfaction
• Create a simple challenge that makes regular visits more rewarding

Resources 🎧 Shownotes: wheresyourcustomer.com/3
About the Host Jo Williams is a certified CX strategist with over 20 years in retail and trade marketing. Her mission is to help retail professionals create experiences that make customers feel valued. Subscribe & Review If this episode gave you a fresh perspective on building customer connections, please leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Your review helps reach other retail professionals who want to discover practical strategies that work.  

Have you ever sat in a meeting, staring at spreadsheets full of customer data, and realised nobody's actually asking about the customers themselves? Not where they are in your sales funnel, but who they actually are as people?

 

I'm Jo, and I've been there more times than I'd like to admit. Years of helping retail teams create better customer experiences taught me something crucial: it's frighteningly easy to lose sight of the humans you're working for when you're buried in KPIs and operational firefighting.

 

This teaser introduces Where's Your Customer? - a podcast for retail professionals who know customer experience matters but aren't quite sure how to improve it with the time, budget, and resources they have.

 

The full podcast launches in a few weeks. We'll explore practical customer journey mapping, aligning teams, proving value to leadership, and turning insights into action. But underneath it all, we'll keep coming back to the people at the centre of everything you do.

 

If you're ready to stop losing your customers in the noise of daily operations and start seeing them clearly again, hit follow now.

 

Thanks for Listening! Get ready for the full launch and visit at www.wheresyourcustomer.com  Subscribe now so you don't miss the first full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Welcome to Where's Your Customer! I'm Jo Williams, and in this debut episode, I'm sharing why most retail customer experience strategies fail and a proven 3-part framework that actually works.   After 20+ years in retail marketing and customer experience, I've learned that 80% of companies think they deliver great CX, but only 8% of customers agree. That massive gap is costing retailers sales, loyalty, and reputation.   I share a personal story from my Asda checkout days that changed how I think about retail connections, I break down what customer experience really means (spoiler: it's not just good service), and I give you practical strategies you can implement immediately - regardless of your role. Key Takeaways ✅ The shocking CX gap: Why 92% of retail customer experience efforts miss the mark ✅ What CX really means: Everything your customer thinks, feels, and does because of how you show up as a brand ✅ The 3-part framework: Functionality (25%), Accessibility (25%), Emotion (50%) - and why emotions matter most ✅ Why it's everyone's job: How every department impacts customer experience ✅ Where to start: Simple questions that transform your customer-first thinking Perfect For

• Retail marketers and operations managers
• Category professionals and team leaders
• Anyone who wants to create experiences that make customers feel valued
• Professionals looking to become more customer-centric in their roles

What I Cover [02:00] The Asda story that shaped my entire career perspective [04:00] The 80% vs 8% statistic that haunts the retail industry [05:00] My definition of customer experience (it's bigger than you think) [06:00] The McKinsey 3-part framework with real retail examples [07:00] Why customer experience is everyone's responsibility [08:00] Preview of what's coming in future episodes Resources Mentioned

• Bain & Company customer experience research
• McKinsey customer experience framework

  Connect With Me Website:wheresyourcustomer.com LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-williams-ccxp/   What's Next? Next week: "Understanding Your Customers Better So You Can Start Wowing Them" - I'll dive into customer personas, insights, and practical research techniques you can use immediately.    

Found this useful?

Don't let these insights get buried in your busy week. Subscribe now and get each new episode delivered straight to your podcast app. If today's episode sparked an idea or solved a problem you've been working on, I'd love it if you could leave a quick review. It would mean the world to me and it would help fellow retail professionals find customer-focused ideas, too. Thanks so much!

A quick note:

The insights and ideas I share come from research and years of working in retail teams just like yours. But every business is unique, so what works brilliantly for one retailer might need tweaking for another. Take what resonates, adapt what doesn't, and always trust your knowledge of your customers and culture.

 

 

In this episode, I talk about the one habit every customer-centric professional needs to master: curiosity. I'm digging into why truly understanding customers is the heartbeat of any customer-centric retail leader, and I've got five strategies you can put into action this week. Plus, I'm sharing examples and tips that prove really listening to your customers isn't just nice to do—it's transformative. What You'll Learn Five Practical Customer Insight Strategies:

1. Listen Smarter to Feedback - Why your frontline team holds the most valuable customer insights in your business
2. Run Shopper Safaris - Experience your customer journey firsthand from Google search to checkout
3. Mine Reviews for Truth - Turn unfiltered customer feedback into actionable improvements
4. Use Search as Your Secret Listening Tool - Discover what customers want before they tell you
5. Track Silent Signals - Read customer behaviour data to identify hidden friction points

Featured Success Stories

• Tesco Club Card: How data-driven loyalty helped overtake Sainsbury's as market leader
• Space NK: Doubling turnover with hyper-local customer insights
• AO: Transforming Trustpilot scores through systematic review analysis
• B&Q: Converting 53 stores into "Digi Hubs" based on customer behaviour data

Key Takeaways ✅ Your shop floor teams know customers better than any dashboard ✅ Basket abandonment averages 70% - but the reasons are fixable ✅ If three customers complain about something, hundreds thought it ✅ Search keywords reveal unfiltered customer intent ✅ The person who brings insights often earns the most influence Quick Implementation Tips

• Start a 15-minute weekly "story time" huddle with frontline teams
• Create a "Three Things We Heard" customer feedback board
• Try shopping your own store like a real customer would
• Use Google autofill and Answer the Public for keyword research
• Fix one customer friction point at a time and measure the impact

Ready to transform your customer understanding? Pick one strategy to try this week and see how curiosity turns into credibility. Shownotes: wheresyourcustomer.com/2 Subscribe: Don't miss practical CX strategies that work in real retail environments