Turkcell provides an array of mobile voice and data communications services in Turkey. With 25.6 million subscribers and roaming agreements with 467 operators in 180 countries, Turkcell – the only NYSE listed company in Turkey – is a true market leader.
Being an innovative company, Turkcell is always looking to make continuous improvements to the range and quality of the communications services it offers
to its subscribers. In 2004, Turkcell quickly realised that Messenger (also known
as Instant Messenger or IM) would be a mass-market service with high
growth potential.
Messenger is among the most heavily used messaging systems in the world
today. There will be 867 million Messenger accounts worldwide by the end of 2005,
and about 1.2 billion by 2009.1 About 12.5 billion Messenger messages are
sent every day across the globe.2
In comparison, by late 2003 nearly a billion text messages were being sent every day around the world.3 Ovum Research estimates that text-messaging volumes
will grow to two trillion annually by the year 2008. This equates to an average of
5.4 billion messages daily. Compared to Messenger, it is easy to see why Turkcell believes that Messenger is an important solution. According to In-Stat, the greatest growth in mobile messaging will come from wireless Messenger, which is expected to increase revenues six-fold between 2007 and 2009.
Turkcell knew the market timing was right for the launch of a Messenger service,
as technology was in place to enable new and legacy handsets capable of using
the service. And the benefits of such a service were clear for the end-users: Messenger provided an easier, richer and fun way of messaging.
With the aid of statistics such as these, combined with the market readiness
and end-user benefits, Turkcell decided to offer mobile Messenger services to
its subscribers.
Key Criteria
As Messenger is a collection of real-time communication services built on
a presence infrastructure, Turkcell evaluated several instant messaging and
presence infrastructure providers using the following key criteria:
Moreover, Turkcell wanted to create its own branded Messenger service instead of acting as an access provider for other branded Messenger offerings. Having a large subscriber base, a very large market share and a strong brand would aid greatly in Turkcell building its own community network.
In the end, Turkcell chose Followap’s iFollow presence solution, consisting
of the iFollow Presence Platform, iFollow Messenger Service, and the iFollow
presence client.
The two companies collaborated to tailor the Messenger service to the specific needs of Turkcell, including adding features to Followap’s product roadmap. Customisation work provided by Followap included integrating the iFollow
Presence Platform into Turkcell’s existing infrastructure, saving crucial time
and money prior to launch.
In February 2005, Turkcell launched their Messenger service, dubbed TurkcellMessenger, enabling IM and chat room services with presence information.
Making the Most of Messenger
Following the launch of TurkcellMessenger, Turkcell wanted to leverage its investment and make sure its presence-based Messenger service was not
only deployed, but increasingly used. Turkcell and Followap continued working
together, utilising Followap’s unique end-to-end Service Success Programme.
This solution includes elements of planning, launching and marketing. With
the initial planning completed and the product launched, marketing now
needed to be addressed.
The service had to be available to as many customers as technically possible. Turkcell plans to offer the service using devices with embedded Messenger
clients, as well as downloadable branded clients for phones already owned by customers. In both cases clients had to be easy to use, thus ensuring a better
end-user experience which would lead to increasing service usage.
Additionally, in order to ensure customers would pay for the service, pricing
plans had to be easy to understand. As such, Turkcell Messenger was launched
to both post-paid and pre-paid customers using 2 simple different pricing methods: monthly subscription for unlimited messaging, and pay per message pricing.
The TurkcellMessenger service was launched for use on 4 phone models using downloadable clients. Within 5 months this was increased to 14 models using downloadable and embedded clients. As a result, approximately 10% of the
total Turkcell customer base – over 2.5 million users – was able to use Turkcell Messenger soon after initial service release. Additional supported devices are constantly being added, continually boosting the amount of customers that can
use the service.
Moving Forward
Turkcell and Followap have already started implementing the next steps in the roadmap plan which aims to offer additional services utilising the presence solution now in place. A subsequent launch designed to appeal to a new market consists
of real-time content services, dubbed Info-services, such as presence-enabled weather and stock quote information. By implementing additional presence services on the existing presence solution, Turkcell is planning to increasingly leveraging their investment in the iFollow presence solution.
In addition to Messenger, the iFollow presence solution presence-enables
services such as text messaging (SMS, chat), voice services (push-to-talk, voice conferencing), information services (weather information), entertainment (online gaming, online dating), and traditional services (voice, MMS). With services presence-enabled, end-users know when their contacts are willing and available
to communicate.
Notes: 1Radicati Group, 2Webmetro, 3Scope
About Turkcell
Turkcell (NYSE: TKC; ISE: TCELL) is the leading GSM operator in Turkey with 25.6 million post-paid and pre-paid customers. Turkcell provides high-quality wireless telephone services throughout Turkey and has coverage of 100% of the towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants. Turkcell provides roaming with 458 operators in 179 countries as of July 8, 2005. Turkcell is the only NYSE listed company in Turkey. Turkcell has interests in international GSM operations in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Northern Cyprus, which have a total of 4.2 million subscribers as of March 31, 2005.
About Followap, Inc.
Followap is the leading provider of Presence solutions to the telecommunications industry. Pioneering this field, Followap's customer base consists today of over 15 network operators with a combined subscriber base of over 150 million users. Followap’s Presence Platform enables operators to establish advanced Presence enhanced services, whilst also creating the infrastructure for next-generation networks.
