Botégo call center solution

Here's a presentation (in Turkish) that demonstrates the advantages our call center solution offers. the video is also available in WMV format at: http://www.botego.com/videos/callcentercozumu.wmv (7.09 MB)


Botégo çağrı merkezi çözümü from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

Visit us at Cebit Bilisim Eurasia

We'll be demonstrating our products and solutions at the Cebit Bilisim Eurasia between 7th-12nd of October. Come visit us at booth #6-159.

Dealing with call center queues

Here's a microsite where we demonstrate how our call center product serves as a knowledgebase and reduces the time needed for call center agents to access information.

http://www.bundanistiyoruz.com

Our lightbox in Taksim subway station

Ever noticed our ad in the tunnel while you're waiting? It also represents our co-operation with the career portal, cokisimizvar.com.

Employee stock options

Employee stock options was one of the hot topics discussed in the panel organized by Golden Horn Ventures this week. Did we mention that we also offer this type of compensation to share the value our employees help us create?

Sir, we can't stop them! They keep coming!

Thanks to Merve (along with Nemo Ramjet's videos), general statistics on how much time visitors spend on an average corporate web site doesn't apply to botego.com. According to data from our tracker, more than 30% of our visitors spend more than five minutes on the website. This also includes the 12.9% who spent more than 20 minutes! Did i mention that number of average daily unique visitors is now 1824? Not bad for a one-year-old SME, ha?

Thanks to Botego, Avea's customer reps now say "Oh be!" (*)

We value all of our clients. It is also true that the larger the operation a particular client is running, the better a chance it is for us to prove the stability of our technology. So, we're proud to announce that Avea, one of the largest telecom companies of Turkey, has chosen us.

Botego will serve as a platform for a faster and more relevant way for Avea's customer rep team to access information. Botego has a lot to offer a company serving millions of customers. Since competition is tougher than ever for a company in the service sector, every single second counts, in terms of both cost and customer satisfaction.

Stay tuned for more exciting news. We still have a lot of moves to make

(*) A quote from Avea ads, expressing the relief one gains for using Avea

Yet another press appereance for Merve

... on the respected journal of Dogan Media Group, by the respected journalist Serdar Kuzuloglu

http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=sa&haberno=3831

The Facebook application

Now i realize it's been a long series of Merve posts, but it really has become a star application for us. As of today, Facebook community, -virtually the whole Internet community- has access to Merve via the fancy Merve Facebook app. Facebook doesn't allow us to build it in a way people can embed it to their profile pages, so it comes in an application frame.

http://apps.facebook.com/merveyitavla

I wish we had been one of the first Facebook application developers from Turkey, but it's still not too late to catch the train.

Web seminars by Botègo

Introducing the "Web Seminars" we'll be hosting on various popular topics on the first Saturday of every month, starting from 8th of December.

http://www.webseminerleri.com

Good PR, bad PR

This weekend our product had four national press appearances. One of them was Forbes Turkey, by the technology editor Ersun Erdinc, outlining the idea behind the "Merve'yi tavla" application and how it became popular. It was a follow-up for the detailed article in the September issue and was quite supportive.

The second one is a "men's" magazine named Boxer, which competes with licensed magazines such as the Turkish versions of Esquire, Men's Health and FHM. That one was funny and included actual dialogs with Merve. Boxer claimed that their readers would doubtlessly be capable of talking Merve into going on a date with them and encouraged them to give it a try.

Third one is called Marketing Turkiye. It was a modest article quoted from a press release agency. Still a good channel to promote our brand, though.

The last one was less positive. A marketing agency had created a bot project for Tefal and based it solely on Botego. The idea was to promote Tefal products to women during a conversation. The agency came up with the idea, created the interface, and sold it to Tefal, but Botego was the heart (from an engineering point of view, the "engine") of the project.

To our surprise, the related article published in Fortune Turkey was written as though the marketing agency had manufactured the whole thing and was able to create any kind of bot (which is not correct). The article did not mention Botego at all. When we discussed our concerns with a board member from the agency, we were told they had not intended to present the project as entirely their own creation. We still have not figured out how the miscommunication happened.

Incidents of misinformation cannot always be prevented, so it is important we swiftly address them in order to preserve our brand value.

Now you can embed "Merve" to your own website!

All you need to do is add the following line to your HTML code, and Merve is up and running on your website!

Trying to hook up with Merve

It's been a while since my last post. We've been busy building new Botego applications. Our hard work has paid off, too: despite still being beta, our last offering has become quite popular.

Merve (a common female name in Turkish) is a 25-year-old, well-educated, liberal and urban lady from Izmir. The mission of this imaginary character is to help men learn how to approach women. Guys simply take their best shot in an effort to talk Merve into going on a date with them. The nicer you are, the better your chances are. If you're good enough, you can get a date from her. But don't even think of being rude to her, as she'll immediately start ignoring you.

The figures are impressive. As of today, *59,084* dialogs took place. The application was mentioned on over 468 referring websites more than 123.000 times. 42,368 people visited the website, generating 144,156 pageviews. At peak hours, Merve handled 35 dialogs per minute, simultaneously. The average length of a chat session was 10 minutes. That means viewers spent a total of 9847 hours (410 days) viewing the website. All of that happened in less than one week!

That's a solid example of how Botego can create awareness and generate new and repeat website traffic when it is combined with a promising concept.

I love progress!

I really do...I can't get enough of it. I remember the day we first signed the lease for our office, which was not long ago. (I will tell you the short history of our startup in a future post.) What I had in my mind on that day was a draft of the concept. We're still at a very early stage, but we already have a decent V2.0 plan. In fact, we have executed part of it for one of our clients and called it V1.5.

In a previous post, I said content is more important than the algorithm in terms of the impact to our success. The first major improvement to the algorithm is on the way, and when we're done Botego will move onto the next level, which I call the first step of advancement.

If you're into progress, you're probably inclined to dislike your previous practices. I find this a very healthy approach. I remember improving my score by 25% on the nationwide college examination on my second attempt. I had realized my first try was way too courageous considering how little I was prepared. That's exactly what I feel these days: I'm never satisfied with what we already have in our hands.

Our third press appearance

Forbes' coverage discloses a lot of details. Too bad there's no English version of the article: Page 1, Page 2