Turkcell Turns 30: Transforming Its Business For The Next 30 Years and Beyond

Don't expect the celebration to last long, however. Turkcell is also in the midst of an ambitious digital transformation strategy aimed at ensuring its continued success in the years to come. It's also playing a significant role in the digital transformation of Türkiye overall, in part by offering a growing number of digital services to customers.

On the traditional telco front, for example, Turkcell customers can now manage their accounts entirely online via the Turkcell App or website, says Mustafa Demirhan. Chief Information and Communication Technologies Officer at Turkcell. That includes various customer service tasks that once required visiting a physical storefront or dialing into a call center.

Transforming From Traditional Telco Into Converged Digital Services Provider

Demirhan recently sat down for a discussion with Telecoms.com Editor Scott Bicheno at Huawei's recent Operations Transformation Forum (OTF) 2024 event in Istanbul, Türkiye.

Demirhan noted that the above example isn't actually that revolutionary – it's simply a must-have in the industry. What is newer is that Turkcell has begun offering a much broader array of digital services that don't necessarily fall into the traditional telco space, making it more than just a voice-and-data play. Turkcell's customer-facing transformation is making it a far more converged provider of digital technology and entertainment services.

Turkcell launched a video streaming service called TV+ that combines live television broadcasts with video-on-demand services. It's already one of the largest television providers in Türkiye. Similarly, the company launched a music streaming service, 'fizy,' and an instant messaging app called 'BiP'.

Turkcell's digital transformation isn't solely focused on consumers, however. The company is remaking its internal operations as well, with an eye toward continued growth without necessarily needing to dramatically increase its staff.

The overarching goal here is to simplify and automate as much of its business operations as possible, even as the business grows larger and more complex. Robotic process automation has been key here, with Demirhan sharing that Turkcell has more than 2,000 RPA workflows running that automate complex and/or repetitive operational tasks.

That has enabled Turkcell to grow its customer base and operations significantly without adding a significant new headcount.

"It's used by engineers, it's used by finance, used by marketing, all of the departments make use of that," Demirhan says, adding that the company provides training to employees on their automation technologies and frameworks.

What's On The Horizon: AI, Sustainability, Data Privacy, Cybersecurity

Like in most businesses – telcos included – AI is a hot topic within Turkcell's executive suites.

"Not a day goes by without mentioning AI or talking about it or brainstorming about it," Demirhan says, noting that there's a mix of hype and reality in the marketplace about how and where AI will have its biggest impacts.

Turkcell has used "traditional" AI, such as machine learning, for quite some time, according to Demirhan, in areas like its financial modeling, as well as in diagnostics and monitoring field operations.

The recent explosion of generative AI applications is leading the latest round of hype, and that's where AI remains relatively new in terms of its use cases in the telco space. Demirhan said that when GenAI hit the mainstream, many in the industry discussed the technology in terms of call center efficiency and optimization, using chatbots and natural language processing to handle customer inquiries and relieve the burden on human agents.

Turkcell is using these technologies in a slightly different way: instead of exposing those apps directly to customers, they're using them in their call centers to help agents resolve questions and problems faster.

"GenAI in the background does a summarization of the customer's issue, and then it also makes recommendations around if the issue has been seen by other customers" in order to speed up the time to resolution, Demirhan says.

It's still early in the company's project, but Demirhan expects to see significant improvements in the average time a customer spends on the phone before their issue is resolved. He added that the technology is not quite ready to replace human agents altogether; rather, for now, it acts like an efficiency-seeking intermediary between customer and agent.

In general, Turkcell is exploring any AI use case that it believes can enhance productivity within the company. For example, Turkcell has extensive documentation within the company – thousands and thousands of new documents and knowledge assets created each year. Searching through them manually is labor-intensive, but a GenAI tool equipped with natural language processing can greatly simplify the process.

Demirhan emphasized the need for taking a principled, ethical approach to AI – one that understates the technology doesn't yet suit every use case or need, and that issues like hallucination are quite real.

In the big picture, he anticipates three key challenges that operators and other stakeholders in the industry will need to proactively address – both specifically because of AI but also in general. First, sustainability initiatives must be treated seriously, especially given that AI applications and infrastructure are very energy-intensive. Turkcell is already using 100% green energy sources, and by 2026, the company expects to generate 65% of its required energy itself through its investments in wind and solar power.

The second is data privacy, which Demirhan rightly noted may get overlooked in the "gold rush"-level of excitement. This includes scenarios like corporate employees entering proprietary data into public LLMs.

Finally, Demirhan stressed the ever-increasing importance of cybersecurity in the AI age – especially as bad actors themselves use AI to develop more sophisticated threats. A single breach could do irreparable harm not just to a specific company but to an entire industry, and collaboration will be key.

"We have to be ahead of the game here," Demirhan says. "This is one of our key strategic investment areas. We are building internal services as well as services that we give to our customers as well as to other organizations to make sure that we are ahead of the malicious people here."