A lot has happened since
February 2005 when we
last reported on Radar,
Rabobank's Customer
Relationship Management
portal. The Word looks
at what the Electronic
Distribution Wholesale
team has been doing to
develop the portal further
and prepare for its European
rollout later this year.
Platform for electronic collaboration
'Radar's overall mission is to enable staff to work together
to deliver the best possible solutions for our cliënt base
and, in doing so, increase cross-sell across all product lines,'
says Theo van Koningsveld, Manager Electronic Distribution
Wholesale, of the Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) portal he has been developing for the last two years.
Based on Radar's easy-to-use functionalities, its successful
implementation in the Netherlands and Dublin and the
positive feedback from users, this mission is well on the
way to being accomplished. Two important developments
are still on the horizon, however: the European rollout of
the system between now and the end of the year, and the
integration of Radar with the new Rabobank dotcom site
that is due to go live in November.
'We've heard of CRM systems being developed in other
companies and failing, because the scale of the systems
was too big, and they didn't fulfill the users' requirements,'
says Van Koningsveld. 'We didn't want to make the same
mistake, so before we even started work on Radar, we con-
ducted interviews with 50 Wholesale employees to make
sure that our ideas matched their needs. We've also put a
lot of thought into how we integrate the system across the
Group. We're based in Utrecht, and it made sense to start
here so we could keep a close eye on what was happening.
Only after we were sure that everything functioned as it
should did we look at implementing it in other branches
around the country. We finally went international with the
Dublin branch earlier this year.'
Before Radar was developed, every product line had its
own silo of information and operated very well individually.
The problem was that employees had little idea what their
colleagues in other product areas were doing, and whether
several different people were approaching the same cliënt
with conflicting proposals. This approach didn't make
Issue 12-October 2006 The Word 13