CDO Guy Magrath Eases RS Components Into The Digital World

Chief digital officer of the catalogue-based electronic and electrical components company faces the challenges of offering customers “an amazing experience around the world” and evolving the culture for employees.

Like many catalogue-based businesses, RS Components is transforming itself into a digital one, expanding operations from its home market of the U.K. only to sell in 30 countries worldwide. At the same time, its product range of 100,000 electronic and electrical components has increased to more than 500,000.

The key challenges, says chief digital officer Guy Magrath, is finding a way to “offer our customers an amazing experience around the world” and to “evolve and change our culture for our employees.”

For its maintenance and design engineer customers worldwide, an amazing experience comes down to one component—ease. “[They ask] predominantly across three things,” said Magrath. “Can you make your user experience, whether on or offline, as simple and easy as possible? Can you make it quick, so I can get off your site quickly? And, finally, connectivity—I need to be able to access your offer any place, anyhow, anywhere.”

In response to this, the FTSE 250 company has moved from a waterfall to an agile approach to improve the experience. Magrath explained: “We have six agile teams that are continually building and developing new solutions for our customers … we measure this via Net Promoter Score … and we’re seeing that as we fix [our customers’] problems and make their lives as easy as possible … we’re becoming a richer, better digital business that is seeing faster growth and greater customer satisfaction.”

During its digital transformation, Magrath points to three important lessons learnt: first, true digital transformation can only come from the top, only then will it gain true momentum; second, a holistic view with everyone looking at the customer in the same way will help teams understand the true pain points, so they can be fixed; and third, it’s best to do a small number of bigger things well, measure extensively, and report back on those to show performance change.