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.

6D AGO

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
MAR 22

19| Making The Business Case For Customer Experience in UK Retail

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.

23 min
MAR 15

Emotional Investment and Luxury Retail Customer Experience

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.

36 min
MAR 8

5 Conditions Shaping Every Retail Customer Experience Strategy

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

26 min
MAR 1

Customer Experience Leadership: Is the Role Still One Job?

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

22 min
FEB 22

Do Playful Retail Teams Design Better Customer Experiences?

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

18 min
FEB 15

Retail Manager Burnout: Where Does Your Time Go?

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

18 min
FEB 8

Online Shopping vs In-Store Shopping: 6 Patterns UK Retailers Are Missing

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.

21 min

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

21
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2025
Show Website

Where's Your Customer?