Saturday, February 24, 2007

You can't think outside "our box"



This is a subset of various expressions standing for "Ne haber?" ("What's up?" in Turkish), including virtually every typo you can imagine.
Now that Botego handles more than 50 cumulative dialogs a minute, we've become quite an expert on how our people's minds operate, including how they fail to operate correctly. The total number of conversations has reached the millions, bringing the volume of logs to a whopping amount of gigabytes. Therefore, we no longer need to foresee such variations, as our valuable users have been voluntarily contributing to our database. All we need to do is analyse it with the proprietary software we recently developed. So, you can try out any typo you can imagine, and we'll immediately add it to our list, if we already haven't.

If one of our biggest assets for building innovative products is creativity, the other one is the expertise we've gained from operating those products.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Helping Turk Telekom help their customers

Turk Telekom is the incumbent telecom operator in Turkey and has been majority-owned by Saudi Oger Telecom, which acquired a 55% stake from the Turkish government for USD 6.55 billion. As of 30 June 2006, the company had approximately 18.9 million fixed lines. Turk Telekom is also a leading provider of DSL services to both residential and business customers, and of leased lines to business customers. For the year ending on 31 December 2005, Turk Telekom had revenues of TRY 7,478 million. Considering these figures, one realizes Turk Telekom has a very large customer base. And now they're *our* customer.

Earlier today, a Botego application we developed for Turk Telekom was featured on their website with a banner which boldly stated "24/7 online customer support" and reported more than 7000 dialogs were recorded in the first couple of hours. We consider the first 10000 dialogs as the pilot dialogs, because they help us see how accurately we forecasted the content the application would need to cover. At this stage I can tell we're pretty successful at addressing the inquiries regarding matters such as DSL issues, tariffs and applications. In more than 500 dialogs, users were redirected to the TTNet call center, a separate entity who has been responsible for DSL operations for quite some time. (Most customers apparently are not aware of that, and they keep calling the Turk Telekom call center for DSL-related issues.) So we're proud to announce that we've already met the expectation of reducing call center costs on the very first day of our operation. As the name "Bot with an ego" implies, we will get better and better each day, so stay tuned for more success stories!