As a leader, staying customer focused in retail is harder than it sounds. Priorities shift. Budgets reset. A sponsor moves to a different role, and a piece of work everyone previously agreed on suddenly stops being a priority.

Persistence is a personally developed skill that keeps customers front of mind through it all. It isn’t taught or budgeted for, but it takes a lot of work and effort, and it deserves to be understood.

Why Staying Customer-Focused in Retail Is Getting Harder

Retail teams are smaller than they used to be.

Schuh cut 39 roles across its head office and stores in early 2025, part of a wider cost-cutting restructure. It’s a response to high commercial pressure, and it’s happening across the sector.

The result is that fewer people are responsible for keeping the customer’s perspective in mind, leaving less time to do so. If staying customer-focused feels harder than it used to, that’s an accurate read of current conditions, not just a personal burden.

What the Research Says

A meta-analysis of project failure data, combining figures from Gartner and Forrester, found that around six in ten customer experience projects are abandoned partway through.

The usual reason is that the return wasn’t visible fast enough, so attention (and budget) moved elsewhere.

Separately, Medallia’s research found that nearly three-quarters of customer findings never reach other departments. Put together, these two figures explain a common pattern:

When commercial pressure rises (or teams shrink), customer insight stops moving through the organisation, and customer focused work loses airtime before it has time to pay off.

So the organisation keeps collecting insight, but:

• it doesn’t spread widely,
• it doesn’t stick long enough to change decisions,
• and the same issues resurface later as if they’re new.

When the business no longer carries the customer perspective by default, it lands on individuals to:

• keep raising the same issues,
• re-explain the context,
• rebuild support,
• and keep the work alive long enough to show results.

The Cost of Staying Customer-Focused

Customer Experience is a female-dominated profession, but leadership still isn’t. Around 70% of the CX workforce is female, yet only around 30% of leadership roles are held by women, according to CX Today, which is a wider gap than in most other professions.

That matters because it changes who ends up doing the uncredited work of “keeping the customer in the room”.

Research on women in leadership meetings shows an extra layer of labour. You’re not only making the point, but you’re also managing how the room is reacting to it. And that is sometimes the hardest part.

There’s a second cost here: emotional labour.

It’s the effort of staying “professional” on the outside when you don’t feel that way on the inside. Research links that kind of masking to burnout over time, and women report having to do it more often than men.

In CX, this can look like carrying the customer issue for months, watching it get deprioritised, and still showing up calm and constructive in the next meeting.

That frustration felt, and composure shown, takes effort. It builds up, and it often doesn’t show up in a simple engagement score.

The nature of customer contact is also changing. As routine queries move to self-service and automation, the interactions that still require a person are increasingly the complex or difficult ones. Think repeat complaints, frustrated customers, situations with no simple resolution.

The overall volume of human interaction is falling, but the emotional demand of what remains is concentrating onto fewer people rather than being spread more thinly across the team.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

At this point, it would be easy to think the business case for staying customer-focused is getting harder to prove. But the evidence is actually moving in the other direction.

UK customer satisfaction, tracked by the Institute of Customer Service, has now risen for three consecutive periods, reaching 78.2. Around 36% of UK shoppers say they’d pay more for excellent service, which is the highest figure recorded since tracking began in 2014.

And over the long term, it shows up in performance too. Separate research from Watermark Consulting found that companies known for strong customer experience delivered returns 7.8 times higher than laggards over an 18-year period.

In other words, customers are rewarding sustained customer focus more than they have in over a decade, at exactly the point when retailers have less capacity to sustain it.

What Good Structure Looks Like: B&Q and Halfords

B&Q cut more than 600 roles in 2025 as it restructured its store leadership. Its chief executive made it clear that the change was designed to free up more staff time for customer service on the shop floor.

This isn’t a Customer Experience team getting bigger. It’s customer focus being spread across more of the operation, so the customer experience isn’t dependent on one specialist chasing it through every trading meeting.

Halfords rebuilt its tyre supply chain to enable same-day delivery to garages and expanded its mobile van fleet. That bakes customer accessibility into how the business runs, rather than relying on individual staff to compensate for a slow system.

In both cases, the persistence of any one CX person still matters. But what changes is the level of persistence the organisation needs, because more people are already customer-focused by design.

Key Takeaways

• Most CX work doesn’t get cancelled because it’s wrong. It gets cancelled because it doesn’t deliver quick enough returns, or is deprioritised.
• When teams are smaller, and the business is under pressure, customer insight often doesn’t reach the people making day-to-day decisions.
• “Persistence” becomes part of the CX job, especially in smaller teams. You end up re-raising the issue, re-explaining it, and re-building support until it sticks and the work gets back on the agenda.
• That persistence has a cost. It includes managing the room and staying calm when you’re frustrated, work that usually isn’t recognised or measured.
• The business case is still there: satisfaction is rising, people say they’ll pay more for great service, and companies with strong CX outperform over time.
• The goal isn’t to find “more persistent” CX people. It’s to build the customer into how the business runs, so it doesn’t rely on one person pushing it every week.
• A quick test for leaders: if the CX person stopped pushing, would the customer still be mentioned next month?

Resources Mentioned

• Gitnux — Project Failure Statistics — source for the project abandonment figures above.
• Representing the Customer in Retail: How CX Professionals Find Their Voice on the courage to speak up in a single moment, a related but different skill to the one covered here.
• The Picture of the Customer That Doesn’t Keep Up — on why customer understanding fades over time.

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