Welcome to another Leaders in Customer Loyalty: Executive Spotlight, where we bring you insights from top executives driving innovation and excellence in customer engagement. Today, we’re thrilled to feature Aly Blawat, Senior Director of Customer Strategy at Blain’s Farm and Fleet. She is a seasoned leader in customer loyalty and the driving force behind Blain’s rewards programs, credit card offerings, and customer insights strategy.
With over 15 years of experience in the loyalty space, Aly has a deep understanding of what it takes to foster customer advocacy, streamline in-store training, and create meaningful engagement strategies. In this conversation, she shares her approach to aligning loyalty initiatives with business goals, leveraging first-party data to enhance customer experiences, and overcoming the challenge of driving program adoption across diverse customer segments.
Beyond her professional expertise, Aly also opens up about leadership lessons learned from her early career in retail management, the challenges of balancing a high-impact career with family life, and her passion for outdoor recreation.
Join Loyalty360 CEO Mark Johnson as he explores how Aly is shaping the future of customer loyalty at Blain’s Supply and gain valuable insights into the strategies that are making an impact in today’s evolving retail landscape.
Read the excerpt below and listen to the full interview on the Leaders in Customer Loyalty Podcast.
Mark Johnson: How does Blain's work to meet the evolving needs and expectations of today's customers?
Aly Blawat: We leverage post purchase surveys and some other first-party research to understand how our customers are expecting their experience to be at Blain's. We track that over time to learn how those expectations are changing. We're also leaning into our vendor partners, our store teams, our contact center team to really learn where we might be falling behind or where there might be friction in our customer's experience today.
MJ: Getting to know you over the last year, I know you have a passion for your customer loyalty program. One of the things that you've developed is a focus around in-store training and developing advocacy for the program. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to bear?
AB: I've been in the loyalty space for about 15 years and to me, getting the buy-in is one of the hardest parts. People want to know what the secret is to get more people to sign up for your program. Is it the value proposition or the sign-up bonus or hiring the right kind of people who are selling the program in your store or putting together the marketing to sell the program online? While all those things are important, it just comes down to asking consistently. There's not a silver bullet; there's not some super fancy secret out there that you can pay all the money in the world to get. It just comes down to asking every customer, every time if they know about the program and how you personalize your response back to them.
MJ: When you look at things you may do outside of work, what's one passion outside of work that you enjoy?
AB: Well, right now in my current stage of life, my hobbies have become taking my children to wherever they want to go. But as a family, we enjoy outdoor recreation quite a bit. We fish, ice fishing right now in the wintertime, ice skating. We do hunt as a family. We go hiking. We're planning on getting a little more into camping and kayaking this summer. Now that my youngest is a little bit older, I also have horses. I do a little riding whenever there's time. So, lots of outdoor things.
MJ: What was your first job after college? What do you remember most about the position?
AB: An assistant store manager with Kohls, and I remember the dynamics of the people on my team. I was a young 22-year-old leading a group of people who had incredibly diverse backgrounds. Some were part-time working in high school or college, just to make some extra money. Some were part-time and they were retired, and they had worked for decades as nurses, machine operators, teachers, or police officers. They had very advanced careers before working in retail. Some people on the team had worked in retail longer than I'd even been alive.
Having that group of people to lead right out of school as an assistant manager taught me so much about what to do, but also definitely what not to do. Patience and how to build credibility with the team. I really owe a lot of my success in my career to that team in Brownsburg, Indiana.
MJ: What's one or two things that you learned you shouldn't do?
AB: Make assumptions. Unless you're assuming positive intent, don't assume everyone knows everything. Not all communication comes in the same form and sometimes people might be missing some critical components of that message.
MJ: You have a very successful customer loyalty program. You mentioned that you've driven organizational alignment. You have a great training program. What do you think the biggest opportunity for customer loyalty is your customer loyalty program?
AB: Our opportunity at Blain’s is with the breadth of loyalty stages. We have a lot of customers who shop with us weekly for consumable type goods that need to be replenished. Then we have other customers who shop two to three times a year for weather-related or seasonal goods. We've got people who come to us just for toy land or people who come to us only when the sun comes out for the first time in the spring.
My goal is to reward all of them and everything in between in unique ways because we're solving multiple problems here. The way our program sits today, it's a little too universal. It's not as customized. I think we can do quite a bit more to encourage those less frequent shoppers to become quite a bit more loyal, even if they aren't purchasing in that consumable good area where they're buying animal feed, dog food, or food and beverage for themselves or their families. There's another way to break in.
MJ: What's the biggest challenge you have faced in your life and how has that shaped you as a person?
AB: I’m a mom, I'm a wife, daughter, sister - all the all the roles, but I have a career. Being a working mom, I'm trying to balance all the things that my family wants to do with what I want to do with my career and in my personal life. The challenge comes in wearing all these different hats and making sure that I've prioritized those roles in my life in the right way so that I can do all the things that I want to do with all the people that I want to surround myself with. That my kids are happy and healthy, my husband is happy and healthy, I'm happy and healthy with both my personal life and my work life. That's really been an evolving challenge. As people grow and age and change, priorities change over time, but staying true to what that end goal was.