  The use of the BFKL kernel improved by the inclusion of subleading terms
generated by renormalization group (RG) analysis has been suggested to cure the
instabilities in the behavior of the BFKL Green's function in the
next-to-leading approximation (NLA). We test the performance of a RG-improved
kernel in the determination of the amplitude of a physical process, the
electroproduction of two light vector mesons, in the BFKL approach in the NLA.
We find that a smooth behavior of the amplitude with the center-of-mass energy
can be achieved, setting the renormalization and energy scales appearing in the
subleading terms to values much closer to the kinematical scales of the process
than in the approaches based on the unimproved kernel.
