Today we continue the campaign “Business Services & Innovation”, and this is why we discussed with Iulia Somoiag (Marketing Coordinator at Valoris Center) to learn more about how their company is innovating. Enjoy!
How important is innovation for your company?
Valoris Center is one of the top Romanian players in a very dynamic industry, permanently driven by change. Therefore, innovation lays at the core of our activity and is strongly related to our performance. This is exactly why innovation is one of our company values and our way of adding value to our customers. It is one of the key pillars to developing long-term partnerships with our clients.
How does your company “encourage” innovation?
Over time, within our company we’ve fostered a climate where ideas are openly shared among employees. Since 2014 we’re unfolding an internal project called “The lab of ideas” where everyone can submit their ideas and suggestions for improving the existing working processes, the work environment or any other aspect of our activity. The best ideas are implemented and rewarded, in order to encourage innovation and a continuous share of best practices.
What are the main areas of innovation?
We focus on three areas: improving the solutions we offer to our clients, constantly increase our productivity and making it easier for our employees to work. The key guaranty to deliver excellent services is developing innovative systems that back our customer care activity. Today, only companies that are able to proficiently use technology have leverage. So, technology is the main innovation area for Valoris. We strive to create greater levels of automation and we’re all about efficiency and customization.
Does your company allocate a certain percent of the budget to R&D / innovation programs?
We are investing each year in innovation. For the current year we have allocated almost 1.5% from our revenue to R&D, in order to make key improvements in our working processes. We consider that the development of our company is linked to flexibility and to our ability to adapt to the changes taking place in the contact center industry.
Please describe the most important, brand new (or just new) project, the time you spend developing it, activities, teams, specializations and information about the client (if possible).
We are currently implementing RPA and AI processes for our human resources department. In order to have the best tools available for delivering a unique experience for our candidates, a dedicated project team is working on optimizing our internal HR processes. It’s challenging but also incredibly satisfying to deploy such a bold idea and we’re looking forward to have a great story to share with you soon.
Do you have any innovative automation processes in your company? If so, which are those?
We have automated a communication process which initially involved three systems and required 9 steps for a message to be delivered. This automation streamlined the activity of our support agents, made it easier for us to be efficient and to offer excellent services to our customer.
Where do you place Romania on the global innovation scale (in business services sector)?
Romania has a middle-income economy, therefore our country’s performance in research and innovation is rather modest. But in the business services sector innovation is not optional. And even more, since we act in an international market, we need to keep up with global expectations. So, in this global dynamic industry, BPO companies must innovate and thrive by offering new technological solutions, despite the country of operations. We must adapt in order to offer cost efficiencies and to deliver the results that our customers expect.
What are the major changes and challenges of our industry in terms of innovation?
In the last few years, a new digital ecosystem was developed in our industry that offers multiple ways to achieve customer intimacy. But its sustainability depends on innovation and on creation of different business models. Therefore, companies within our industry must identify and develop new working methods and have to explore in order to create processes that rely on digital technologies.
Nowadays, the majority of BPO companies have the data in place but they are struggling to manage it from a technical and operational perspective. This is the main challenge for the contact center industry and the one which asks for innovative solutions. Innovation is strongly linked to our industry, therefore we must find new ways to use the available data to streamline our activity.