David Hicks, TribeCX, on Emotional Goals and Proving They Pay in Retail

David Hicks has spent forty years proving that how customers feel shows up in the numbers. The people who do that job are now vanishing across retail, and his verdict is harder than you would expect from someone who built a career in them. A role that could not show the line to cost, margin or sales, he says, was always exposed. He joins host Jamie Hamer to talk about why, and what he would tell anyone trying to keep theirs.

The first half of the episode is about evidence. What finance needs to see from an experience team, why meeting that bar has not always been enough, and how an organisation settles on a small number of emotional goals and then acts on them. David works through it in examples rather than frameworks, drawing on a session he ran with the RNLI, a bank experience lead working with almost no budget, and the prepaid postcard Harley Davidson tucks under every saddle.

The second half of the episode turns to retail. It covers who answers for the customer when a concession makes the sale, and what delivery choice does to abandoned baskets. From there it moves to where aftercare sits for a retailer that wants it to build trust, and what AI is and is not doing in service work. Jamie and David also compare notes on the squeezed middle, and on what new technology has and has not changed. It closes on a quick-fire round, including a metric David would ban tomorrow, and his craziest story in retail.

About TribeCX
TribeCX is a customer experience coaching and advisory business founded by a group of practitioners including David Hicks, and launched publicly in December 2016 as a hub created for CX people, by CX people. It runs masterclasses, journey diagnostics and coaching for experience teams across sectors from finance to logistics.