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.

4d ago

43| Community Space in Retail. What makes it work?

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
Aug 30

How to Improve Stakeholder Engagement in Retail Projects

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
Aug 23

41| Currys Retail Technology Case Study. What UK Retailers Can Learn.

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
Aug 16

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

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

44
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2025
Show Website

Where's Your Customer?