Tobias Walraven is an entrepreneur and CEO of RIFF, a company that focuses on complex and urgentcustomer care challenges for large and medium-sized enterprises.
Born in Zeeland and raised in Voorburg, it wasn't necessarily expected that Tobias Walraven would become an entrepreneur. His entire family worked for the former PTT, and it seemed logical that he would follow suit, but things turned out differently and he ended up at the HEAO. There, he gained everything he needed to start his own business, which is exactly what he did. In 1985, at the age of 21, Walraven registered his first company, SNT, with the Chamber of Commerce, and from that moment on, things moved quickly. His first major client was a company struggling with a surge of dissatisfied customers, both in-store and on the phone. Within a single day, Walraven set up a call center from scratch and personally hired nearly 100 people to staff it. Barely 15 years later, in 2000, the company went public. The launch of SNT Group N.V. was crowned with a price for the most successful IPO of the year. Five years later, the company is acquired in its entirety by major shareholder KPN, and it subsequently disappears from the stock exchange. However, that does not mean that Walraven entered calmer waters; quite the contrary.
In 2006, Tobias Walraven started a new venture: Europe’s first indoor whitewater course, Dutch Water Dreams. The company got off to a flying start as a training center for the Dutch Canoe Association and became a popular destination for private individuals and, more importantly, businesses. But as promising as the start was, the 2008 crisis hit hard, and in 2011, Dutch Water Dreams went under.
After this whitewater adventure, according to Tobias Walraven returned to his roots: solving complex problems in the field of customer care. As a strategic advisor, Walraven focuses primarily on identifying new trends in communication behavior. He shows companies how they can respond to these trends by deploying new technologiesand channels, helping them optimize conversion and increase customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
From 2018, Tobias Walraven took on the role of CEO of RIFF, a customer care company that counts clients such as Philips, Schiphol, McDonald's, and the KNVB among its clientele. With more than 400 highly educated, tech-savvy employees , the company provides solutions for medium-sized and large enterprises experiencing challenges in customer communication or customer contact. Walraven: “What makes us unique is that we don’t work with fixed scripts; we approach every client and every request for help in a personal, human, and creative way. That is how we manage to strike the right chord every time, no matter how diverse our clients may be.”