Where's Your Customer?

Jo Williams
  • 5.0 (2)
  • MARKETING
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Where's Your Customer? is a podcast for retail leaders who want to become truly customer-centric. Through honest conversations, inspiring stories, and practical ideas, we help you see your business through your customers' eyes. So you can build stronger connections, happier teams, and a brand customers can't live without.

  1. This is the AI skills gap in retail. And it's hiding in plain sight.

    4 DAYS AGO

    This is the AI skills gap in retail. And it's hiding in plain sight.

    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.

    17 min
  2. The Silent Drift: How Customer Disengagement in Retail Hides in Plain Sight

    10 MAY

    The Silent Drift: How Customer Disengagement in Retail Hides in Plain Sight

    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

    20 min
  3. 25| The Retail Identity Signals Your Store Is Sending

    3 MAY

    25| The Retail Identity Signals Your Store Is Sending

    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

    24 min
  4. Customer Identity In Retail. Does It Really Matter?

    26 APR

    Customer Identity In Retail. Does It Really Matter?

    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

    18 min
  5. 23| The Truth About Customer Perception in Retail? (And How to Influence It)

    19 APR

    23| The Truth About Customer Perception in Retail? (And How to Influence It)

    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.

    23 min
  6. Why Customer Experience Programmes Lose Momentum In Retail

    12 APR

    Why Customer Experience Programmes Lose Momentum In Retail

    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

    24 min
  7. 21| The Regional Customer Experience Gap Has Nothing to Do With Personality

    5 APR

    21| The Regional Customer Experience Gap Has Nothing to Do With Personality

    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

    22 min
  8. Your Customer Satisfaction Measurement Looks Healthy. Here's What It's Missing.

    29 MAR

    Your Customer Satisfaction Measurement Looks Healthy. Here's What It's Missing.

    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

    26 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Where's Your Customer? is a podcast for retail leaders who want to become truly customer-centric. Through honest conversations, inspiring stories, and practical ideas, we help you see your business through your customers' eyes. So you can build stronger connections, happier teams, and a brand customers can't live without.

Information

  • Creator
    Jo Williams
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    Where's Your Customer?