Customer service across international borders

RS Components is the world's largest distributor of electronics and maintenance products.

We have operations across Europe, Asia-Pac, the US and Middle East distributing over 500,000 products from over 2,500 suppliers under the trading brands of RS Components and Allied Electronics.

One of our advisors who handles customer orders and enquiries in our Scandinavian contact centre, Daniela, took an inbound call from an existing customer who enquired about 100 units of a Moeller Logic Module. This would be a significant order for us in this region and one we were keen to secure!

Unfortunately, due to the wide range of components we distribute, we didn’t have this large amount in stock from our normal warehouse. After investigation the back order – 66 units would have taken a long time to be fulfilled from the manufacturer. Due to time pressures, we knew the customer couldn’t afford to wait this long.

Daniela recognised that the order, and our ongoing relationship with the customer, might be at risk if we couldn’t fulfil the full order – potentially causing them to look for an alternative supplier.

Daniela took immediate action and contacted her colleagues within the UK and France for support. We have a network of some 761 advisors handling orders and customer enquiries through voice, email, live chat and, for certain markets, fax. Through collaboration with colleagues across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, UK, France & Germany, Daniela and the team managed to obtain the back order units three weeks earlier than was originally communicated to the client – allowing RS Components to meet the desired delivery date.

We received excellent feedback from the client – he was simply over the moon at how prompt, efficient and helpful our advisers were. As well as the brilliant customer compliment, the customer service excellence orchestrated by Daniela not only won this order, but the customer has also placed regular further orders with RS Components referencing the excellent customer experience he had received. Obviously we are now doing our very best to match his customer service expectations as we set the bar so high!

I’d like to thank RS Components team members Daniela, Marte Heggedal, Henry Mangal, Mark James, Hermann Baudry, Georg Fixmann and Thortsten vom Stein who were responsible for this customer service interaction. We now use it as a Best Practice example for customer service throughout the company and for adviser training purposes.