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.

1d ago

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
Jun 21

Why Understanding Retail Customers Is Harder Than It Looks

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
Jun 14

31| The Truth About AI and Customer Experience in Retail

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
Jun 7

30| When Retail Customer Spending Habits Look Fine. But Aren't.

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.

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

38
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2025
Show Website

Where's Your Customer?