Understanding the “zeitgeist” and the new paradigm

TEMPO BPO DISCOVERED THE NEW PARADIGM THAT WOULD TRANSFORM THE BUSINESS IN THE FUTURE AND FOLLOWED A ROCKY PATH TO ADAPT ITSELF. CEO CEMAL AKAR LEADS THE CHANGE IN HIS OWN COMPANY AND IS NOW COMMITTED TO HELPING TRANSFORM COMPANIES INTO DIGITAL STRUCTURES COMPLIANT WITH THE NEW ECONOMY AND PARADIGM.

BPO CEO Cemal Akar recalls the days when he TEMPO launched a venture with his business partner Kadri Onel to provide infrastructure to market virtual airtime minutes and virtual point-of-sale (POS) for a telecom operator.

In 2001, he co-founded “AloKontor” with Onel through the line 4441010 and began selling virtual airtime minutes for a Turkish telco with a virtual payment capability. The very next year, the venture turned into a 20-year-long journey with the establishment of Tempo.

Akar had to quit his first venture, an activity portal, after seeing the potential of value-added services in the telecom industry. Tempo helped Vodafone Turkey (former Telsim) to increase its commercial subscribers to reach 200,000 from 80,000 small businesses. Seeing the sales potential of call centers in early 2009, Tempo evolved to be one of the first in the business targeting the telecom industry and changed its strategy accordingly in 2011.

The call center business helped the company grow by 10-fold between 2010 and 2012, Akar says. Allured by such growth, Tempo attracted the attention of Japanese conglomerate and diverse investment company Mitsui & Co, which invested in the company in 2013. However, further growth plans took a blow after Turkey saw drastic forex volatilities followed by economic turmoil. Then the rules of the game changed, Akar remarks.

It preferred to wait and see the aftermath of the storm. Turkey, in the meantime, observed elections, terrorism and forex attacks. It took a long time to understand what was going on, he says. “We began to observe the new system by 2016 and later understood that what was happening in Turkey wasn’t unique at all.”

The near future, from 2020 to 2040, has a different paradigm that you should prepare for, Akar notes. From this logic comes the change in the company, which was restructured according to the ideas of Dutch philosopher Humberto Schwab of the Socratic Design Academy.

Large entities are now turning into smaller structures and platforms and embracing the gig economy model, he says. Akar and his partners decide to divide the company into three divisions to create an agile organization.

Now, Tempo BPO provides services as a customer experience center, technology operations center (TechOps) and digital transformation office verticals, according to the CEO.

The TechOps Center offers services to manage communications between brands and customers in an integrated way, at all stages of the customer lifecycle. Its technology operations center provides solution designs and resource management for scalable and periodic needs in the fields of "software test automation" and "data labeling and cleaning" with its remote service model, as per its website.

And the digital transformation office helps SMEs go global with the help of digital transformation and provide the infrastructure for them.

The company has just recently bought back its shares from Mitsui and finalized its transformation and digitalization journey.

It acquired a small call center in Dresden, Germany, and renamed it Tempo Communication as of March 2022. It invested more than TRY 5m in the business that positions it as a center to provide its services to the

European market.

The European market is getting older and Turkey, along with the Eastern European countries, will be the service provider to the largest market in the future, with the company aiming to target the continent and penetrate to the heart of it, Akar says.

It plans to launch similar microsites around the Balkans and Eastern Europe, with countries like Macedonia, Ukraine, Romania and Albania on the radar, he adds.

“Remaining just a call center business wouldn’t help us survive as technology has killed the business and we had to restructure to sustain the company.”

The partners in Tempo have established Magma Ventures, which became the owner of the company as a holding company but acts like a diversified investment firm. Angel Effect, a venture capital firm, and an Estonia-based venture building studio have made investments in the startups.

Tempo also invested in human resources to train talent for its needs and the needs of its clients with an academy. Both Turkey and the world need a trained workforce of young people that know how to use CRM, Akar remarks.

The new call center provides a crowd software testing service and generates a report in two hours with a 75people team, besides other services like user acceptance tests, among others.

The company works with more than 35 blue-chip companies like Phillip Morris International, Decathlon, Astra Zeneca, Bein Media Group and Turk Telekom. It also signed a business corporation deal with Alibaba in Turkey to facilitate services for Turkish SMEs. The German entity is beginning to offer the same services to German companies, too, Akar said.

Tempo BPO, which initially launched with 15 people in 2002, now employs almost 3,000 in 50 provinces of Turkey and with operations in Germany targeting the European market.

Understanding the zeitgeist and transforming oneself according to the new paradigm pays off. At its 20th anniversary, Tempo aims to post TRY 400m turnover, more than doubling it from the previous year, and expects 10% of it to come from its European operations, according to Akar.