Guest Blog: Sam Wilson, Interim CIO, Nash Squared

Connecting the dots

Hello, I’m Sam and this is now my sixth week with Nash Squared, and what a fascinating journey it has already been!  As interim CIO for Nash Squared, Bev and the Exec team have asked me to look at our business, finding better ways we can use technology to collaborate, communicate and place the customer at the heart of what we do. Some people call it ‘transformation’, but I think a much better description is ‘connecting the dots’.

It’s something I love doing. Prior to Nash Squared I held various CIO and advisory roles including at a major retail DIY business where I helped transform their operations all around the digital journey of the customer.

What does this mean for us?

Programmes like this might sound very high level but the results can be very real and dramatic. At the DIY retailer we scaled the business at pace, massively improving the customer experience and quadrupled annual sales.  Customer service was key, thinking about how we could innovate, make customers lives easier and more convenient.  Testing, learning and simplifying processes enabled by technology meant we were able to increase market share rapidly; rolling out new branches every year, launching internationally and delivering an industry leading website.  

Just as importantly, we were able to change the employee experience understanding key touchpoints and making solutions very easy to use and learn.  We removed many of the pain points such as; manual processes, automating and replacing legacy solutions with modern architecture and had a core focus on being data driven with single versions of the truth for data and insight, enabling us to truly understand our customers and personalise their experience.

Of course, Nash Squared is not a DIY retailer, although it does have customers, data, channels to market, fantastic people, systems, databases and great knowledge. By bringing this together in the right places and right way we have a wonderful opportunity to unleash potential, be different in the market place, and make all of our jobs better and more enjoyable.

It’s all potential

In the last six weeks, I have met with many of you and held workshops to understand our core processes and opportunities.  Thank you so much for your time and support, I have learnt so much and what is really clear to me is Nash Squared is absolutely full of fantastic, passionate people as well as respected brands. We are in a unique position to take advantage of these opportunities due to the breadth of our service offerings and their potential to complement one another.

The opportunity is that, in addition to our people and passion, we can connect more of what we do together. For instance, have a candidate and client experience like no one else, spend more time being insight driven and adding value to colleagues or customers.  

If we can do that, we have the chance to be truly world-class, making it easy for our clients to do business with us.

And that’s something we can all get excited about.

Have a great festive season and I wish you a Happy New Year

Sam

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