Business Services

Lublin, due to an extraordinary quality of life and the accessibility of office spaces, is seen nowadays as a key location for the modern business services sector in Eastern Poland.

Lublin is one of the most prospective Polish cities in terms of locating business services operations. The rapid rise in the importance of the sector in Lublin in recent years occurred due to its convenient location and excellent accessibility, numerous infrastructure projects, a pool of skilled workers and a growing office market. The vast majority of the BPOs, SSCs, IT centres, F&A centres, and R&D centres operating in Lublin were launched in the past seven years. What is more, Lublin’s business services centres have broadened the scope of their activities since their launch and the level of advancement of the services offered by most entities has increased. These two aspects were also accompanied by an increase in the

number of jobs. As for now, Lublin is home to 36 BPO/SSC/IT centres which employ at least 100 people, and the total employment in BPO/SSC/IT and R&D centres is over 14,000. Moreover, Lublin is the largest field of modern office spaces as well as real estate for investments in the eastern part of Poland, with one of the highest office-space growth dynamics. Lublin’s advantages are also the discernibly more competitive costs of space lease and significantly lower processing rates during the purchase of real property compared to other large cities. The city is a reservoir of educated staff for BSS companies. Each year, higher education institutions in Lublin provide more than 15,000 graduates, among which a large group has experience in specialised business services.

Lublin Office Market - January 2024 Rynek powierzchni biurowych w Lublinie - Styczeń 2024 Business Services in Lublin 2023

Convergys – a leader in the customer care industry

One of the world leading companies on the BPO market was looking for a perfect location to run the highest quality contact center for one of European key accounts. This place was Lublin – the city of creative people.

Convergys is a global corporation headquartered in the United States. It is the second largest BPO provider and employs more than 130,000 people in 149 locations around the world, offering customer care services in 58 languages. Convergys serves companies from almost every business sector that needs to maintain exceptional relationships with their customers. Along with the win in a tender to operate Telefonica Deutschland’s nearshore contact centre, the company made a decision to search for a location in Poland. The second subsidiary in the country (after Szczecin) must have been located in a city with qualified human resources, A-class offices and emerging business services sector.

Convergys chose Lublin and in May, 2014, opened its contact centre serving phone and email inbound communication in German and English for German mobile communication provider O2. Lublin was considered better location than Bydgoszcz and Opole thanks to outstanding growth perspectives and supporting business environment created by Investor Relations Department of the City of Lublin. Convergys paid attention to design Lublin Subsidiary to be ergonomic and employee-friendly and to ensure comfortable working conditions. Hence, after three years, Convergys in Lublin is ready to develop and serve other clients in more than 10 European languages.

Local authorities should understand business and willingly answer its needs. That is how it works in Lublin. Moreover, local universities are amenable to cooperate in order to adapt their educational offer to business demands. Employees recruited in Lublin are very creative and ensure high quality of customer service. It proves that Lublin is an ideal city for business services sector development.

Paweł Puła
Site Director
Convergys

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Orange Polska - the first Shared Services Centre in Lublin

The Orange Polska Accounting Shared Services is one of the first shared services centres in Lublin, from which began the expansion of Lublin’s B2B service sector.

The Accounting Shared Services was established to provide high quality financial and accounting services to companies of the Orange Polska group. Other locations in Poland were considered. Ultimately it was decided to choose Lublin, due to its strong infrastructure, large academic population, low market saturation and the attractiveness of the city. Since October 2006, when operations were launched, daily practice confirms it as the right decision, and the centre itself has won numerous awards from the international sector organisation Shared Services & Outsourcing Network.

Lublin offers very good conditions to companies in the B2B sector. Namely, qualified employees, high schools, a rapidly developing office-space market, high quality of municipal services and also tourist attractions. Lublin is a place where you can have a good time. It is not yet as famous as the more popular tourist cities of Cracow, Wrocław and the TriCity, but this also means that the local market is not as saturated. Thus, Lublin is the ideal location for a second main branch, the existence of which is often necessitated by in-house standards and safety considerations.

The city’s potential is further increased by its air and road links. Local government, meanwhile, supports contact between business and academia, with the objective of educating the skilled employees of tomorrow, and also offers assistance in finding suitable office space. The conditions have been created that enable further dynamic development of B2B sector.