Our team discussed with Raluca Leonte, CEO of Webhelp Romania and learnt so many interesting things on their innovative projects. Enjoy!
How important is innovation for your company? What are the main areas of innovation? Are these innovations designed in/for Romania or the global market? Does your company allocate a certain percent of the budget to R&D/innovation programs?
Innovation is what drives the business growth and keeps the talents motivated, so yes, it is one of our strategic pillars. We aim to have a two ways but simultaneous approach: innovation for our people and innovation in our service offering. There is a joint effort of the local and global teams in order to ensure a coherent approach but always keeping the cultural flavor. 80% of the designed innovations for the global market can be localised, our scope being to have a 10% growth on the Romanian portfolio, in the next year. The final goal in innovating is either people or business, which allows us to give more sense to this topic and not just apply a budget ratio: we have dedicated workstreams and usually budgets can go up to 20% of the country turnover and here we are talking about innovation that can have a global scalability.
Do you have budgets allocated for these activities in Romania too? Do you have R&D / Innovation departments both in Romania and at central HQ? Which are the out of the box/innovative global projects made for your customers? How did the Romanian team bring its contribution to the above-mentioned projects?
We like to envision innovation within three different dimensions – leadership, organizational structure and operational structure and this allows us to see technology as the outcome of our approach and not the starting point. Our main contribution towards labor organization within our industry was the implementation of a work from home solution for our clients. We developed fully virtual teams starting from recruitment to production in order to deliver the best talents, flexibility & engagement to our clients. In Romania we orchestrated the design of virtual training, virtual operating model and infrastructure structure for the project. Today we already have 1,000 colleagues at group level and 100 in Romania working remotely with a tremendous potential for coming years.
Please describe the most important, brand new (or just new) project, the time you spent developing it, activities, teams, specializations and information about the client.
Through years, Webhelp developed specialized services tailored for our client’s industries with the main objective of not being considered a provider but a strategic partner. Nowadays we have achieved on being a game changer providing end to end customer care experience focused on delivering value added over volume. The projects that we deliver in industries like Automotive or Travel integrate services from consultancy, customer experience design, digital expertise, multichannel voice of customers to predictive analytics, automation and business intelligence. We empower the brands to be proactive and agile with their customers by creating customized offers at the right moment. Online consumers, whether they want to order a new car or book a holiday, represent our focus. We offer real time non-intrusive analysis on consumers’ areas of interest, purchasing intention and service/product usage purpose in order to generate priceless experiences.
Do you have any innovative automation processes in your company? If so, which are those?
In 2018 we started realizing internal automatization pilots over production back office transactional processes. This year, we launched a complete RPA solution for our Travel clients to help them increase quality in booking experience, decrease website errors and speed up their flow of information among hotels and travel agencies. With the benefit of hindsight, we consider automation can play a strategic shift to help companies leverage talent and value from its people by freeing time on repetitive tasks.
What are the major changes and challenges of our industry in terms of innovation?
Our industry goes through major changes; it is being completely disrupted by emerging technologies and most would say, threatened by RPA Intelligence. We believe the true challenge for the industry becomes the mindset change, the ability to reinvent your business, to remain competitive and attractive for both clients and employees. People are the true capital and developing them, providing them with the right tools and process is the winning strategy for a continuous business growth.