Harry Blamire on retail leadership, AI and delivering an exceptional customer experience

Customer experience has shaped Harry Blamire’s career, from the shop floor to senior leadership. In this latest TRB interview, Harry talks about retail leadership, why retailers must stop “customer washing”, where AI should sit in the customer journey, and why the smallest customer moments can often matter the most.

Customer experience has been at the heart of your career. What does great customer experience really mean to you, and why does it remain such an important driver of success in retail?

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I have always chosen roles that put the customer front and centre. I’ve worked on shop floors, in call centres, and in content and communications; my career has been built around understanding customers and how they tick.

Fundamentally, I am massively nosy about people. I am curious about how people behave, why they make the choices they make, and what they want to buy, do or decide. For me, that curiosity is one of the best ways to run a business.

I have worked in companies that describe themselves as customer-centric, or say they make customer-led decisions, but they do not always walk the walk. It can become the equivalent of greenwashing. Maybe we should call it “customer washing”.

At Lush, customers were properly part of the conversation. I remember sitting in senior leadership meetings where customers were there with us, helping shape discussions around pricing, store locations and what would or would not work for them. They would tell us plainly if they thought something was a brilliant idea, or occasionally, a terrible one!

Following their lead helped us represent the whole customer base and prevented us from getting stuck in institutional thinking or doing things just because as retailers, we think we know best. Customers leading and driving the business, and helping you make better decisions, will always lead to stronger results.

You have led teams through growth, change and transformation. What leadership lessons have shaped you most, and what do you think sets great leaders apart?

I have thought a lot about my leadership purpose and spent time reflecting on my own leadership style. I have also had the privilege of working with some brilliant leaders, and that exposure has helped shape the kind of leader I want to be.

For me, authenticity matters. I have learned not to suppress my personality, my opinions or my perspective just to fit in. You can give the best version of yourself when you bring your whole self to work.

My aim has always been to be the leader I wanted to see when I was coming up. In some of the companies I worked in, I did not see enough people leading with empathy, charm, humour and openness. I saw people playing the part of what they thought a leader should be. It was important to me to become someone others could look at and think, “yes, that is someone I would want to work for or learn from”.

In my view, the qualities that make a great leader are honesty, integrity and trust. It sounds obvious, but doing what you say you are going to do speaks volumes. It builds confidence and helps bring teams together around a shared mission.

Empathy is also vital. I know I have a high emotional intelligence, and I think being able to understand different perspectives gives you better input and better decisions. You get more rounded information from the people around you.

And finally, feedback. I ask for feedback constantly. Ginny Wakefield, my previous line manager at B&Q, is a passionate advocate of this. She invited feedback all the time and helped create a high-performance culture where people could have open, honest conversations, regardless of hierarchy.

That matters because feedback is ultimately about helping someone become even better than they already are. I spend a lot of time talking to customers on the front line, listening to understand, and reverse mentoring with my team, and putting my ego aside to constantly ask, “how can I/we do better?”

With so much focus on technology, AI and innovation, what fundamentals must retailers get right before they can deliver an exceptional customer experience?

There is a real temptation with the explosion of AI to run towards the shiniest, flashiest execution of it in a customer experience environment. Visual search is a good example. It is exciting, attractive and useful when applied properly, especially if a retailer has a huge catalogue and wants to help customers find a particular item.

But if you skip straight to the technology without first understanding why and how customers want to use it, or what problem they are trying to solve, you can end up building tools and functionality that do not serve a real purpose.

Sometimes the customer does not need every possible feature, a full product comparison, or endless LLM-generated information. They might simply want to know what something is called. And too much information, delivered by an algorithm that thinks it knows you, can create choice paralysis and cognitive overload.

For me, we can deliver exceptional customer experience when we allow AI to help us become more human.

AI is incredibly useful for automating repeatable queries and answering basic questions that take up a lot of time. If you can use AI and machine learning to do that heavy lifting, it frees people up to have deeper, more personal conversations and build connections and relationships with customers when it really matters.

That is where it becomes powerful. Use AI to handle the repeatable so your people can personalise the emotional.

Looking back on your career so far, what has been your proudest achievement, and what continues to get you out of bed in the morning?

I am going to be greedy and have a couple. There are things I am proud of personally, such as completing my MBA in strategic leadership during COVID, while everything was online and I was balancing it with a full-time job. That was tough, and I am proud of myself for doing it.

Being promoted to director level at the Royal College of Surgeons of England also meant a lot. It felt like an acknowledgement of the hard work I had put in over the years, both as a leader and as a specialist in my field.

But the moments that stay with me most are the small ones where a job well done has made a real difference to a customer. One example happened very recently at the College. A surgeon based in Iran had sent us their original primary medical qualification in 2022 as evidence of eligibility to sit an exam. Later, the hospital where the only copy of that certificate was held was destroyed, so they had no record of his qualification other than the hope it was somewhere in our building.

For months, he had been trying to get it back. As someone relatively new to the College, I had to unpick processes, ask questions, work out where things might have gone and eventually access our archives. At last, I found an unmarked archive box, opened it, rifled through a stack of uncategorised documents and pulled out his certificate.

I cannot tell you how that felt. It still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It might sound like a micro example, but to me it was huge because I had helped someone in a way that really mattered to them.

I have moments like that throughout my career where I feel I nailed it on behalf of somebody else. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It is not about being good at emails or ticking off tasks. It is about understanding what makes a difference, or what creates a positive outcome — even if it’s for one person.

That’s what customer experience really comes down to for me.