The Story of Blue Point, an Interview with Violeta Roşu
The story of Blue Point starts in 2007 with a team of customer care professionals who decided to access the service industry by creating one of the best outsourcing companies in the Romanian market.
Though we can simply list some of the most important moments in the company’s history, we believe it is better to allow Violeta Roşu – Managing Partner at Blue Point Call Center – offer her insights into what is actually valuable to remember about Blue Point by answering to a series of questions.
Violeta Roşu, Managing Partner, talks about Blue Point
1. How did Blue Point appear in the Romanian market?
Blue Point was founded with Romanian capital by a team of experts from customer care and telecommunications industry with a clear goal in their minds: to deliver complete call center solutions to the market.
Our company preserved a healthy evolution along the years. This development occurred in a natural manner by taking care of the people we gathered around us. As for our company’s revenues, we grew by circa 30% every year and we are happy to have around 250 employees, 2 large offices and a growing portfolio of clients.
This positive evolution offered us the opportunity to extend our business and bring aboard an important number of clients, such as Heineken, Hochland, Pepsi, Reader’s Digest, Ţiriac Auto sau Xerox, etc.
At the same time, this constant growth gave us the chance to hire more and more professionals and increase our numbers, which forced us in 2015 to find a better building that could receive all of us and even more.
2. Is there a secret for Blue Point evolution on the Romanian market?
Though every company has its own secret means of doing business in the market, I don’t believe there’s anything more important than employing the right people in the right positions.
In addition, for every service company in the market there are moments when challenges appear and established strategies need to change in order to keep the company on the line. For this reason, I believe that a certain degree of flexibility must exist in dealing with clients and employees.
So, to keep a successful business model, I really think that placing individuals in the right positions and maintaining a high level of flexibility in dealing with clients are two important elements that need to be considered by any company.
3. How is Blue Point different from other call centers in Romania?
Right from the beginning, our company has positioned itself on the Romanian market as a company that offers a flexible approach in relationship to our clients.
We consider that every client has a unique identity which emerged along the years under different circumstances and conditions. We have to remember that our client base is quite diverse and our client companies originate from multiple industries.
All the same, we consider ourselves to be different that other call centers in the market because we continue to keep an open eye to our clients’ needs and find the right relationship between their requirements and our customer care possibilities.
4. How do you see the Blue Point evolution in the following years?
We are quite confident in our company’s evolution and we really believe that we are able to increase our client portfolio in the years to come. We are especially interested in growing our base by adding more international companies and offering our services outside Romania.
In addition to our international reach, we are equally interested to cover new areas of work in the software industry and be able to continue providing successful customer care services to other clients.
5. What are the main challenges in dealing with new clients?
It is great to have new clients and we always do our best to sign new partnerships with companies that may come from various spheres of activity.
Additionally, new clients bring new expectations and challenges for our company which translates into finding new ways to remain flexible and capable to respond to their requests and needs.
Still, if we have to mention one main challenge in our company’s work, I would have to specify the fact that building a new team for a totally new project under a short time-frame is not always easy.
6. How does Blue Point improve its services?
Our company will soon reach 10 years of experience in this industry and we have indeed learned over the years the staying up-to-date in this field is to keep on improving your services and keep on reinventing your brand and your image.
One way to do this is to learn from past mistakes and enhance your product offering by maintaining a strong pro-active mindset that allows you to truly understand your clients’ needs and be able to respond to them in a successful manner.
For example, we love to think about ourselves that we are distinct from other outsourcing or call center companies by a proven ability to provide a flexible service, when required.
For this reason, we came to realize that our clients need more than customer care and to encounter their needs, we are now delivering administrative tasks too, such as Door to Door, direct marketing and data base administration.
7. How are employees motivated at Blue Point?
We talked earlier about our constant focus to place the individual at the centre of our activities and provide trust and assistance.
To develop a bit on this topic, let me just say that we do provide our employees with trainings and team buildings as many other companies in the IT industry, but we like to take things further.
We believe in people and in their capacity to build together. That’s why, the decision to create a friendly work environment is an objective we are constantly focusing upon. We are delighted to offer our employees personal and professional development means, starting with specialized training sessions and team-buildings to end of the year parties, ice cream days, massage days and frappe days.
We consider that valuable people should work in the right positions, according to their skills and talents, and we do our best to discover the hidden talents of everyone in the company. We take steps to make them feel important by involving them in various activities and by offering them the possibility to access new positions in the company.
We do not forget that a call center attracts mainly young people that have a high interest in social activities, a great desire to learn new skills and discover new working possibilities. We know this and we do our best not to disappoint them and keep them involved all the time..
8. Blue Point has been on the market since 2007. How has the industry evolved from that moment on?
There’s no question the Romanian service industry evolved greatly in the last 15 years, and this evolution brought along higher expectations from our clients and their customers.
We have to remember that Romania appeared at the beginning of the 2000’s as a great outsourcing destination for the western companies due to our low cost profile and our great strategic location on the European map.
Now, it is true that things changed and we are a long way from where we were 15 years ago. Our economic and social perspectives evolved and our economy is fast moving our country among the most promising regions to do business, especially for international companies that are interested in outsourcing their customer care departments.
As for the present customer expectations, we have been able to notice a growing awareness in the market on what a great customer care experience is and the way it influences a company’s image. The companies that started outsourcing business operations in our country have noticed that our internal market contains a strong potential in human resources providing skilled professionals in technology and foreign languages.
Finally, I would like to say that the Romanian service industry cannot be separated from the European context in which it emerged and I believe our internal market will continue to develop under the influence of the European space.
Blue Point is a call center company offering customized solutions for outbound (telesales, telemarketing, surveys, etc.) and inbound (customer support, helpdesk info line and technical support, loyalty programs, cross sell upsell & inbound) services. The most popular clients assisted by our company are ING Bank, Metropolitan Life, Heineken, Hochland, Reader’s Digest, Ţiriac Auto, Vodafone and Xerox.
