Change continues at RS Components

Perhaps the biggest change in RS is its move from being a regionally organised business to a global one. Keith Reville, global marketing director for RS' parent Electrocomponents, said: "A year ago, our marketing departments were regional and process based. Now, we're one global function. We see a huge opportunity and want to make our ecommerce engine even better." That will entail upgrading the website's search functionality and developing a mobile site, he added, along with beefing up its already successful social media offering. "We have more followers than our three main competitors combined," Reville offered. RS is also looking to develop what the presenters referred to as 'ecommerce with a human touch'. Mindful that use of its website tends to be a one way affair, RS wants to link more closely with site users by applying 'behavioural marketing'. Klaus Göldenbot, global sales director, pointed to such features as 'live chat', when the website got busy, and calling customers who abandoned their basket without checking out. But the executives admitted that too much of the 'human touch' could end up being counter productive. Another major challenge is making its product line up visible to customers from around the world. Chris Page, global offer director, outlined the scale of the problem. "We stock 550,000 products from 2500 suppliers," he said, "and we're adding 50,000 new products a year, along with content, competitive pricing and the right levels of inventory." Yet RS currently shows less than 10% of what it stocks. "We want to make that 75%," Page said. "It's a big change from where we've been before." One of the immediate moves will be to align the product ranges stocked by RS and its US subsidiary Allied Electronics. With this, new products will be launched around the world at the same time. "We'll be holding £280million of inventory in 17 distribution centres, with products available globally on one, two or three day lead times."