Just because you can automate something in your business does that mean you should?

As your business grows, automation can feel like the obvious answer to buying back much-needed time and capacity.

But there are two extremes I see all the time: Those who automate everything because they've been told that's what scaling looks like. And those who automate absolutely nothing because the tech feels so overwhelming that running everything manually somehow seems easier.

Neither approach is particularly helpful.

So in this episode, I'm sharing the three questions I ask myself before I automate anything in my own business or my clients' businesses.

Because good automation is about knowing where your personal touch makes a real difference, what you need to keep visibility of, and whether removing yourself from one interaction gives you more capacity to show up somewhere more valuable.

What we cover:

• Why automating everything isn't necessarily the answer to scaling your business
• The risk of removing yourself from customer touchpoints that need you
• Why visibility matters when you're automating a course, membership or program
• How customer data can help you make better long-term decisions about your offer
• Why every automation should buy back capacity for something more valuable
• How to audit automations you've already built using these three questions

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

What if you could automate almost your entire customer onboarding experience... without making it feel automated?

In this episode, I'm taking you behind the scenes of a recent Done For You client project where I mapped out a 12-month onboarding experience for an evergreen group program.

My client had transitioned from cohort-based launches, where everyone started together, to an evergreen model where students could enrol whenever they were ready.

The problem?

She was still offering plenty of live support, community access and opportunities to get help, but engagement tended to drop a few months after someone joined.

And she couldn't spend her days manually keeping track of where every student was, what they'd completed and who might quietly be falling behind.

So we designed a system that could.

I'm walking you through the three layers we used to create an onboarding experience that tracks the signals students are sending, delivers timely automated nudges, and deliberately brings my client back into the experience when a human touch actually matters.

The result is an onboarding journey that's 95% automated, with the remaining 5% intentionally unscalable.

Because scaling your customer experience doesn't have to mean removing yourself from it.

What we cover:

• Why evergreen programs require a different approach to onboarding
• How I mapped a 12-month customer onboarding journey
• Why we started with customer research rather than automations
• How to identify the milestones that predict customer success
• What you can track to understand whether customers are engaging
• Why automation should support your live customer experience rather than replace it
• How to identify the moments where a personal check-in matters most
• 3 questions to help you start mapping your own automated onboarding experience

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

What if your customer experience didn't begin after someone bought from you, but with the way you designed your offers?

In this episode, I'm joined by offer strategist Ceels Lockley to explore a topic I don't think gets enough attention in the online business world: the experience your offers create.

We dive into why many offers don't actually have an offer problem at all. They have a messaging problem.

We also explore why constantly creating new offers isn't the answer, how to design an offer ecosystem that naturally guides customers from one stage to the next, and why AI still falls short when it comes to building meaningful, differentiated customer experiences.

Along the way, Ceels shares the thinking behind her festival-themed business, her unique approach to offer ecosystems, and the intentional customer experiences she's built into every part of her brand.

If you've ever wondered whether your offers are working together or simply sitting next to each other, you'll love this conversation.

What we cover:

• Why poor messaging often gets mistaken for a bad offer
• The biggest mistake business owners make when an offer isn't selling
• Why your offers need time to evolve instead of being replaced
• The difference between an offer ladder and an offer ecosystem
• How to create a customer journey that feels natural instead of forced
• Why themed customer experiences create more memorable brands
• The thinking behind Ceels' festival-inspired business model
• How exclusive experiences can strengthen customer engagement
• Why AI still struggles with nuanced offer strategy and positioning
• How to build offers people genuinely want to buy

Connect with Ceels Lockley:

Website: https://ceelslockley.co/

Podcast: https://ceelslockley.co/podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ceels.lockley/

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@its.ceels

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

Most online business owners believe they're creating a great customer experience. But are they measuring it?

In this episode, I'm giving you an exclusive sneak peek inside the brand-new State of the Customer Report 2026 sharing three of the biggest gaps emerging across the online business industry.

From confidence without evidence, to loyalty programmes that never get off the ground, to the growing importance of transparency in an AI-powered world, these findings reveal where businesses think they're succeeding... and where customers are experiencing something very different.

If you've ever wondered whether your customer experience has blind spots, this episode is for you.

What we cover:

• Why confidence doesn't always equal customer success
• The surprising percentage of businesses tracking absolutely nothing
• Why loyalty programmes remain more idea than reality
• The buying factor customers ranked above bonuses and urgency
• How AI is widening the gap between polished marketing and genuine trust
• Why measuring customer experience matters more than ever

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

In this episode, I'm taking you behind the scenes of a recent client project that completely changed the direction of an established membership.

Like many business owners, my client thought she had a pretty good understanding of what her members wanted. But instead of relying on assumptions, we went straight to the source.

The results uncovered messaging gaps, feature requests and blind spots that simply wouldn't have surfaced if we'd only listened to the loudest voices inside the community.

In this episode, I explain why customer research is one of the most underused growth strategies, and how you can start gathering better insights for your own business.

What we cover:

• Why assumptions are holding many businesses back
• The three audiences you should include in your customer research
• The gap between the metrics businesses track and what customers experience
• How better audience research improves both retention and conversions
• The biggest mistakes people make when designing customer surveys
• Why hearing uncomfortable feedback can become your biggest competitive advantage

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

In this episode, I'm taking you behind the scenes of a recent client project that completely changed the direction of an established membership.

Like many business owners, my client thought she had a pretty good understanding of what her members wanted. But instead of relying on assumptions, we went straight to the source.

The results uncovered messaging gaps, feature requests and blind spots that simply wouldn't have surfaced if we'd only listened to the loudest voices inside the community.

In this episode, I explain why customer research is one of the most underused growth strategies, and how you can start gathering better insights for your own business.

What we cover:

• Why assumptions are holding many businesses back
• The three audiences you should include in your customer research
• The gap between the metrics businesses track and what customers experience
• How better audience research improves both retention and conversions
• The biggest mistakes people make when designing customer surveys
• Why hearing uncomfortable feedback can become your biggest competitive advantage

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

In this episode, I'm unpacking a cancellation survey response from a former Retention Lab member that perfectly captures one of the biggest misconceptions I see in online business:

"I'm focused on getting members right now, so there's no need to focus on retention."

The problem? Retention and acquisition aren't two separate strategies.

Every interaction someone has with your business, from the moment they discover you, is shaping whether they'll trust you, buy from you, and eventually come back again.

In this episode, I explain why I believe retention starts long before a purchase, how I build that philosophy into my own business, and the small changes you can make to create more personalised customer journeys without rebuilding your entire funnel.

If you've ever thought retention was something you could "worry about later", this episode might completely change how you think about your customer experience.

What we cover:

• Why customer retention starts before the sale
• The surprising insight from a member cancellation survey
• What I mean by "Love at First Click"
• Why treating every subscriber the same hurts conversions
• How personalised customer journeys increase trust
• The connection between relevance, customer experience and retention
• Three stages every retention ecosystem should cover
• One simple way to make your email marketing more human without rebuilding your entire funnel

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

You've launched before, your audience knows you, and your offers have sold successfully.

So surely launching your next offer should be easier...

Right? Not always.

In this episode, I share the behind-the-scenes story of working with Krista Miller from Summit in a Box on the launch of a brand-new offer. While Krista had years of experience and a loyal audience, one thing still stood in the way:

Founder bias.

Let’s unpack why being an expert in your own business can make it harder to see the messaging gaps, assumptions and blind spots that can derail launches before they even begin.

If you've ever questioned whether your next offer will land, this episode is your reminder that sometimes the biggest breakthrough comes from borrowing someone else's perspective.

What we cover:

• Why successful launches can create dangerous assumptions
• The hidden impact of founder bias on your messaging
• Why audience research is about much more than writing better copy
• How customer insights shape offers before they're built
• The difference between assumptions and evidence
• Why experienced business owners still have blind spots
• How objective feedback transforms launches
• The role customer journey design plays before someone ever buys

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

If your evergreen funnel isn't converting, your membership churn is creeping up, or you just have a nagging feeling something in your customer journey is off... this episode is going to help you start diagnosing the issue.

The tricky thing about a broken customer experience is that it rarely shows up as a complaint. People simply go quiet, unsubscribe, or cancel. And when you've built everything yourself, you're often too close to it to see where it's falling apart.

Today I'm walking you through a practical starting point for diagnosing your customer journey and finding what I call the moment that matters.

What we cover:

• What a customer journey is and why it's so hard to diagnose from the inside
• The moment that matters and what it means for whether someone stays or disengages
• Why dissatisfaction almost never shows up as a complaint (and what to look for instead)
• How to map your customer journey by phase and spot the blind spots
• The two questions to ask yourself when you're looking for where things go wrong
• Why talking to your people is still the most underrated research tool you have

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.

If you've ever caught yourself adding yet another idea to your list and calling it progress, this episode is for you.

So many small business owners are sitting on genuinely brilliant ideas that never make it out of the planning phase, and it's not because the ideas are bad. But deciding what to act on, and actually committing to it, is one of the hardest parts of running an online business.

In this solo episode I'm digging into why the idea-to-execution gap exists, what keeps us stuck in the loop, and what it looks like to finally get out of it.

What we cover:

• Why saving ideas feels productive but isn't moving the needle
• The decision-making loop that keeps brilliant ideas stuck on the list
• Why trying to execute everything at once is one of the biggest traps
• The difference between planning and progress (and how to tell which one you're doing)
• The questions to ask yourself to work out which idea is worth acting on right now
• Why an outside perspective changes everything when you're stuck inside your own business
• A real client story: how a membership owner went from months of overthinking to a full restructure that reduced member churn and reignited her motivation

View the episode transcript here.

Where to from here?

Grab the 2026 State of the Customer Report FREE right here.

Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.

Join Retention Lab🧪, the community to help you build a signature customer experience that keeps people coming back, gets them talking and grows your business without you having to start from scratch every single month. Join here!

Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.

Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.

😍 Love the show?

Hit subscribe or follow so you never miss a new episode.

Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).

Leave a positive review to help the show get found by more small business owners just like you. To leave a review:

👉 Find What Would They Do? on Apple Podcasts

👉 Scroll to ‘Ratings & Reviews’

👉 Tap on the stars to rate the show before writing a review

Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.