Where's Your Customer?

Jo Williams

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Marketing
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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.

3d ago

Empowering Frontline Teams to Show Empathy in Retail

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 What this episode covers: Why average handling time is treated as an outdated measure but is still used to assess individual employees How Waterstones changed decision-making authority for its booksellers, and what happened to returns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
Aug 9

39| The Click and Collect Customer Experience: What Retailers Get Wrong

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.
Aug 2

38| How To Get Back To Simple: Reducing Customer Effort in Retail

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
Jul 26

37| Store Value Beyond Sales: What UK Retailers Are Missing

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
Jul 19

Staying Customer-Focused in Retail. Persistence Matters.

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
Jul 12

How AI Saves Time For Retail CX Teams (And What To Do With It)

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
Jul 5

34| From Listening to Watching: How Retail Customer Insight Has Evolved

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
Jun 28

33| Representing the Customer in Retail: How CX Professionals Find Their Voice

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

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.

Creator

Jo Williams
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

41
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2025
Show Website

Where's Your Customer?