Container Centralen

Container Centralen is the manager of almost all carts in Europe that transport flowers and plants. Their customers are gardeners or garden centers who want to transport flowers and then easily return their carts elsewhere or pick up new ones. From Quatronic, we developed My CC: the new customer portal where Container Centralen customers can place and manage orders.

A new customer portal

Over the past few months, a Quatronic team has been building an online portal for Container Centralen (CC) customers. As befits these types of portals, it has been named My CC. Container Centralen manages the CC Pool, where approximately 3.5 million CC Containers are transported around flowers and plants every year. Their customers are gardeners or garden centers that transport flowers and plants and then easily return their carts elsewhere or pick up new ones. The majority of transactions are handled over the phone. At the head office in Hoofddorp, customer service people speak to customers in 8 languages who want to return, pick up or exchange carts at one of the 50+ depots in Europe.

In this day and age where you have a bag of groceries on your kitchen table at the touch of a button, it's hard to sell that you still have to call to pick up or drop off a flower container. That's why, after a 2-day design session, we created the blueprint for a customer portal and worked from September 2021 to January 2022. Via My CC, CC customers can now make agreements to pick up, exchange or return new CC Containers. They can also view their own contracts or balance and transfer them to other customers.

Building a Customer Portal with OutSystems

We usually build apps and systems to support business processes and the users are employees of the company itself. For this project, we really created an application that is used by our customer's customers. All customers have their own language, so we've translated the portal into 8 languages. With standard OutSystems functionality, this is very easy, technically speaking, because having a group of people translate 2,000 words without too much context during a development process does involve some organizational bumps.

Because there are different requirements for apps for end customers than for an internal system, a fresh new design has been developed together with communication agency 100% Leiden. A Business-to-Customer app via OutSystems is another success for Quatronic.

Onboarding

Due to the seasonal hustle and bustle at work, the application still needs to be put in the spotlight. Currently, there are 80 customers who work with it and send their transaction requests to CC via the app. This summer, My CC should become the route for customers to express their requests. In the meantime, we will continue to replace the logistics system.