News

Smart Virtual Assistants to Respond to the Digital Customer

Published

4 years ago

12/23/2020

Kokou Adzo

We talked to Dürin Artuk on how Ingosa responds to frequent and simple questions of digital customers on the social media platforms.

Table of Contents

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Gökçe Duman: We’re trying to stand the gaff and be as productive as we can since the global quarantine period at the beginning of this year. For now, everyone in our family is doing fine in Turkey.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Ingosa.

Gökçe Duman: My partner Dürin and I have been close friends since our undergraduate years at Istanbul Technical University (QS 650). Since then, we had this dream to build a company together (we’re thinking about running a game development company back then), and then we had the chance to enter the digital marketing world together, too; thinking that this would be the initial step and support to establish our dream.

She’s much more into software development and machine learning (has two native android apps in the Google Play Android Market, too, which she’d written by herself). I’m much more into user experience and customer experience optimization. We’d worked several years together at one of the first digital marketing agencies in Turkey (Me: Search Engine Optimization department, Dürin: Search Engine Marketing department, which covers mentoring user experience optimization to my own team and brands such as L’Oréal Turkey, THY, Danone and so on) and then decided to run our own business three years ago; established our own digital marketing agency Ingoduo, focusing on SEO, SEM, UX, and chatbots. Beginning from summer 2020, we’ve accepted to Workup by Türkiye İş Bankası (acceleration program which is open to all startups from early stage to seed-funded) and welcomed our second dream totally focused on chatbots, Ingosa (Ingoduo Smart Assistant)! With the help of Ingosa, we help brands move their customer experience to the next level and increase their revenue with conversational AI.

How does Ingosa innovate?

Gökçe Duman: At Ingosa (our chatbot product and the reason we’d been accepted to Workup by İş Bankası Türkiye):

We move customer experience to a new and better level using the power of conversational marketing. We create not only Facebook chatbots but also WhatsApp and website bots as well to reach goals and optimize by leveraging AI to meet the users with the content they want by enabling the customer to find the right product in a very short time and by making the conversation smarter.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Gökçe Duman: In parallel with the increase in time spent at home and on the internet with the pandemic, interest in chatbots has increased and continues to increase. There was even a WhatsApp bot project in which WHO answered frequently asked questions and daily statistics about COVID-19. In cases where intense information flow is required, instead of copy and paste answers, this information flow can be carried out quickly and automatically through the desired channel thanks to chatbots, thus improving customer experience.

Although we are the first batch to move completely online in the Workup startup acceleration program, we have seen that distances have never been an obstacle for anything, and we continue to see it every day. Since the work we do and the benefit we provide is dominant in the online world, we can say that the pandemic has a leverage effect for us.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Gökçe Duman: No we did not.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety?

Gökçe Duman: Since we’re and have been very busy with our work online, only stress comes from that daily rush, but it is sweet. You don’t have much time to worry about any other anxiety if your work is online.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Gökçe Duman: We have many local and foreign alternatives such as Intercom, Mindbehind, Manychat. The features that set us apart are our three-year data history and dynamic team, we offer this service faster than our rivals, and we have competitive pricing options.

In addition to that, we give rich feature sets in a basic package; thus, you don’t need to buy additional packages.

Last but not least, our product Ingosa has a 1-day problem-solving guarantee by fast support.

Your final thoughts?

Gökçe Duman: We’ve gained experience in chatbots since our agency establishment three years ago and providing them as a service. Since last year, our main focus has been chatbots, and that’s why we’ve built Ingosa as a product and a separate business this summer. Our top three priorities are getting our MVP ready by the end of this year, creating a marketing plan for our own product, and finally generating an income for our product. We aim to reach 100 paying customers next year. Wish us luck!