In meetings, the conversation might be about a new process, a service change or a commercial decision. I listen to why the business wants it and what it hopes to achieve. Then I ask the question I’ve asked for years: “Okay, so how’s the customer going to feel about that?”

When I reached episode 50 of Where’s Your Customer?, I went back through my transcripts. The same question kept coming up across very different topics. Seeing that pattern helped me understand what finding your voice in customer experience has meant for me: following a question I care about into a business’s decisions and the assumptions behind them.

Here are six lessons I took from that reflection, and how they can help keep the customer visible in a retail business.

1. Finding your voice in customer experience starts with the questions you ask

I assumed a professional voice meant having strong opinions and stating them confidently. Mine turned out to be a question I’ve asked throughout my career.

It goes back to my first episode and a customer I served at Asda. She thanked me for talking to her because, some days, I was the only person she spoke to. Nobody had designed that conversation, and nobody measured it. It mattered to her, and that’s why I still ask how the customer will feel.

In practice: start with what you already do. Go back through a few months of meeting notes, emails and comments on project documents. Write down the questions you asked more than once and the decisions that frustrated you. The pattern in those two lists says more about what you stand for than a mission statement written from scratch.

2. What a business intends and what a customer experiences are often different

Topps Tiles ran a separate value brand, Tile Warehouse, before consolidating it into the main Topps Tiles brand in 2026. Tile Warehouse had grown 23% in the first half of the year. In the half-year results call, chief executive Alex Jensen said running two brands had made it harder to present a distinctive offer to customers, and that bringing them together simplified the customer proposition. For a customer with a budget in mind, two brands had meant one more decision before choosing a tile: which shop to go to. I looked at this in How to Get Back to Simple.

Businesses organise themselves around brands, departments and systems. Customers usually focus on what they’re trying to do, not how the retailer is organised.

In practice: before a change is signed off, list every extra decision, step or piece of information it adds for the customer. If the list has anything on it, the business is passing some of its own complexity on to customers. That can be the right call, but it should be a conscious one.

3. The commercial result of a decision rarely shows its full cost

At Bury Market I watched a woman wait at one fish stall when others nearby were free. The trader knew her, and they talked while he served her. The Bury Market Question looked at what that kind of relationship means as markets such as Altrincham and Crewe move towards food halls and dining.

Those changes have sound commercial reasons. The trading figures show rent, footfall and stall occupancy. They don’t show the relationship at that fish stall, so a change can remove it without anyone deciding to.

In practice: add a section to the business case that sets out what customers could lose, next to the saving or the new income. It doesn’t have to stop the decision. It means the people signing it off can see both.

4. Customer research only changes decisions if the right teams see it

At Iceland, a long time ago (!) I worked on a ‘Food You Can Trust’ project. We commissioned research into how customers felt about frozen food, used it to build a campaign, and it worked well. Looking back, I realised the findings stayed mainly in marketing and strategy teams. I didn’t think to share them with operations or other commercial teams, who could have used them in their own decisions. I came back to this in What happens to customer insight after the research ends.

Collecting customer information, understanding it and using it are three separate steps. It’s easy for a business to stop after the second.

In practice: when you write the research brief, name the teams who should see the findings and the decisions each one could use them for. Book the time to take the findings to those teams before the fieldwork ends.

5. Credibility comes from being clear about what you know

I started one episode with an idea about the mistakes retailers make. As I worked through the examples, I realised I was judging decisions from the outside. I didn’t know what research each business had done, what alternatives it had considered, or what constraints it faced, so I couldn’t fairly call them mistakes.

The more useful question was what each business expected customers to do as a result. The episode became What Are We Expecting Customers to Do?, and it was a better episode for the change.

In practice: when you present to leadership, separate what you’ve observed from what you’re assuming, and say which is which. Being open about the limits of your evidence makes the rest of it easier to trust. It also lets you change your view when new evidence comes in.

6. Detailed thinking is useful when it ends in a decision

At work, I’ve been told I go into too much detail when people want a quick answer. I need to work through the details to find the point that matters, then simplify it. For a long time, I treated that as something to fix.

Making a weekly podcast has taught me to keep the detail and add a deadline. Each episode needs research, a position and a finished script by a set date. That discipline has shown me that part of finding your voice in customer experience is practising deciding when you’ve done enough thinking to say something.

In practice: when you start working through a customer problem, agree when you’ll make a recommendation. Explore the detail you need to understand the customer impact. Then state your recommendation and what evidence would change it.

Finding your voice in customer experience: the question to take into your next meeting

Fifty episodes haven’t changed what I believe about customers. They’ve made me clearer about why I believe it, and more confident saying it.

If you take one thing from this, try the question in the next decision you’re part of: “Okay, so how’s the customer going to feel about that?” You don’t need to challenge the whole decision or bring an alternative plan. Asking it gets the customer involved while the decision can still change.

Three questions to take into your next decision

• What extra effort, steps or decisions does this change ask of customers? What might they lose?
• Which teams need customer insight to act on it?
• What have we observed, and what are we assuming before we recommend a change?

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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 learning you took from today’s episode?

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