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.

5d ago

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

20 min
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

15 min
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

17 min
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

18 min
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.

16 min
May 31

29| Customer Storytelling in Retail: Insight That Drives Decisions

Most retail teams have more information than they know what to do with. The problem isn't the data; it's that data alone rarely shifts what happens in meetings or conversations with stakeholders. Customer storytelling in retail is the skill that closes that gap. Learn how to turn insight into something a room full of operational, commercial and digital priorities can actually act on. This episode covers: Why NPS numbers organisations trust most may be telling an incomplete story, and what sentiment analysis of written customer comments reveals about the gap The six questions that structure both listening to customers and telling their story in a way that lands How the same customer illuminates different stakes for different audiences and why that matters for how you tell the story The three ways storytelling could go wrong internally, and the simple guardrails to prevent them Thanks for Listening! Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know — particularly whether trying the six questions changes what happens when you bring customer evidence into a room. 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/29 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

15 min
May 24

Responsible AI Use in Retail: What You're Putting Your Name On

The moment an AI output stops being "something the tool suggested" and becomes your professional recommendation is easy to miss. This episode looks at that handover, when nobody double-checks, when a 'plausible' statistic almost ends up in a deck, and what it actually takes to know which outputs are reliable (rather than just hoping they are). What this episode covers: Automation bias and why the risk arrives after practitioners feel comfortable with a tool The two types of task AI handles very differently: working with material you've provided versus generating from its own training data, and how the output looks identical either way What the ICO says about customer data in AI tools and what changes under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 Three questions to ask before opening the tool, with examples from M&S and John Lewis Partnership on how responsible AI deployment looks at scale Thanks for Listening! Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know whether the three questions landed for you and whether any of this shifted how you're thinking about what you put your name on. Here's the link to the ICO Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/28 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

17 min
May 17

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

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

35
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2025
Show Website

Where's Your Customer?