“The Point Isn’t to Showcase AI but to Turn It Into a Solution”

You’ve been in the CX industry for many years. Could you start by sharing your career journey in this field with our readers?

I’ve spent many years working in areas that touch customer experience directly. It all actually began with my very first job, in Financial Consultancy at Commercial Union. That’s where I first saw how critical it is — what you make the person you’re communicating with feel, what kind of experience you create for them. Even in that first job, I sensed how many different feelings “being a customer” can hold, and how fragile the journey really is that carries someone from a first contact all the way to a loyal relationship.

Over time my career shifted toward B2B. In corporate structures, I experienced firsthand how customer experience has to be simulated and designed down to the smallest detail — including everything behind the scenes that the customer does or doesn’t see. I learned one thing very clearly: what determines the value of the work you deliver is the importance you place on the customer’s experience. Both value and price are shaped by what that experience makes people feel.

Today at Turkcell Global Bilgi, we’re moving forward with a professionally designed experience-journey approach aimed at giving both employees and customers the right feeling — and we keep learning every day.

We’re curious about your thoughts on the relationship between sales and customer experience.

Sales is really the process by which a customer becomes convinced of what they’ll experience once they start using a product or service, how their problem will be solved, and how sustainable that relationship will be. I’d say sales is the promise of the experience to come. So a sales team isn’t just selling a product — it’s also responsible for proving how realistic that promise is, for the comfort that follows the sale, and for the company’s consistency.

That places a very serious responsibility on the sales department. Because when the issue is experience, the goal is both to make continued use of the existing service sustainable, and — through the trust that’s been built — to be the first choice when new needs arise. Naturally, sales has to have an unbreakable bond with every other department in the company. Every other unit is really a huge support army working to create the perception in the customer’s mind that “This team solves my problem.”

Could you briefly tell us about Turkcell Global Bilgi’s recent activities?

Lately we’ve put most of our energy into perfecting our products and services. We work across a wide range — from our switchboard, customer management platform, STT, TTS, voice recording and social media management platform, to our customer/employee experience, help desk, remote support and RPA solutions — integrating these products with AI-powered solutions.

I’d like to underline the sector’s critical dividing line here: today the issue isn’t “having” AI, it’s genuinely weaving it into the fabric of operations. The data shows 88% of call centers use AI in some form, but only 25% have been able to fully integrate it into their daily workflow. As an R&D center, that gap is exactly where we stake our claim: not putting technology on display, but turning it into an operating layer that produces measurable results — moving from simple “filtering” to “solving” the job end-to-end.

Our most exciting project right now is Tellia, the AI customer representative we developed ourselves. In Tellia we combine three strengths: our solid infrastructure, our meticulous approach to information security, and our biggest differentiator — our field experience. I emphasize security in particular, because in a world where AI is scaling, trust and data privacy are no longer a nice-to-have — they’re the foundation.

Do you have expectations or predictions for changes in the sector in the coming years?

Predicting the change AI will bring to our sector is no longer a matter of guesswork — every study shows we’re one of the areas that will be most affected. Everyone’s talking about customer representatives turning entirely into AI. Yes, there’s real momentum there; but even before that, a “channel migration” had already begun to affect us, driven by technology, digitalization and well-designed processes making different channels more accessible. That was actually the dynamic that started transforming us, well before AI agents.

It’s a fact that repetitive tasks that don’t require complex management will gradually be handed over to AI on voice and written channels. But I don’t believe human contact will disappear entirely — at least not in the near future. As work becomes solvable remotely, we’re already seeing some new business processes shift toward our channel.

Right now we’re experiencing how much of the work can be solved with AI, but we’re also aware we’re still at the “technically possible” stage. Because it’s a two-sided equation: the customer also has to adopt this experience, accept it, and keep the conversation going. The whole world is working at a dizzying pace to strike that balance. As a strong part of this transformation, we’re doing great work with our AI customer representative Tellia, and we’re following the results with real excitement.