Where's Your Customer?

For a long time, HMV has felt like a retailer that should have disappeared. Music and films are streamed, and Amazon can sell you almost any physical or digital media. Yet HMV is still on the high street, and it seems to be growing. So why do people still shop at HMV, and what does that tell us about a store's role in people's lives? In this episode: What the old HMV did for customers, and which o...

A customer turns up to collect their partner's order. Someone wants to return a jumper without the receipt. Someone's phone has died, and the order number is on it. These are ordinary situations, but many retail processes are set up as if they won't happen. In this episode, I look at what happens when the journey we design meets real life, and what those moments can tell us about our customers. In...

At 50 episodes, I went back through every script and found the same question running through almost all of them: "Okay, so how's the customer going to feel about that?" In this episode, I reflect on what making the podcast has taught me about customer experience and how I think. I explore: Why your professional voice is often in the questions you keep asking What Topps Tiles, Bury Market and my ow...

When customers believe your brand promise, who in the business actually keeps it? In this episode, I explore how retail delivers a brand promise through stock, staffing, systems, and budgets, and what happens when teams change things without understanding how those changes will affect customers. Why John Lewis withdrew Never Knowingly Undersold in 2022, and what changed when it returned How a bran...

Many of the availability and range problems customers notice in-store stem from agreements between retailers and their suppliers. These include order quantities, delivery days, range reviews, contract prices and payment terms. In this episode, I explain how those agreements affect what customers find on the shelf, and how retailers can make customer experience part of their supplier relationships....

How much time do you leave between hearing from customers and deciding what to do? I've kept a journal for nearly thirty years, and publishing this year's edition made me ask what it actually gives me. In this episode, I look at how we reflect in customer experience, and at where we put the things we haven't made sense of yet. Why so much of what matters in CX doesn't fit in a feedback platform, a...

What Are We Expecting Customers to Do? Every retail decision asks customers to do something differently. Shop somewhere else. Choose a different product. Understand a new process. Accept one kind of value in place of another. In this episode, I unpack six real UK retail decisions to reveal the customer ask hidden inside each one. What did customers need to do differently for the decision to change...

Years ago, I worked on a food research project that delivered exactly what it was meant to. It shaped a campaign, informed decisions, and changed customer perceptions. But it never really reached beyond the marketing and strategy teams. This episode explores what happens to customer research after the original project ends, and how to share useful findings with others. What this episode covers: Wh...

I got a chip in my windscreen. It's a leased car, so I went to the lease company's website, found a phone number (no booking link), and spent nearly fifteen minutes on the phone while someone walked me through a form, question by question. Afterwards I looked at the normal Autoglass journey. I got through almost the whole thing online in about ninety seconds. The service worked, but I got a very d...

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 ear...

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 ne...

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 prac...

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...

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 re...

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...

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...

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...

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 a...

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...

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. Thi...

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'...

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 th...

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 pr...

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...

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...