Concepts such as customer experience and employee experience have been setting the agenda recently.

Payment, product preferences and store sales points have all been shaped according to customer experience; the same goes for the energy industry and cloud technology, namely their battery designs and capacity increases.

All these were addressed during this week’s Ventures60 event, which brought together entrepreneurs and investors in an online environment.

The event was attended by many prominent names from the industry, including Ilker Baydar, co-founder of Fuudy, a new generation food and beverage delivery platform, Beyazıt Öztürk, director of NGN Data Center and Cloud Solutions, and Yusuf Kaya, Batron Energy co-founder.

In their speeches, the executives listed some production and service portfolios that have been shaping according to the customer experience.

On the other hand, Sure Köse Ulutaş, founder of new generation human resources startup TalentMelon, spoke of the transformation in the employee experience during the coronavirus pandemic.

Healthy nutrition trend

Good nutrition has always been important, but during the pandemic, it cemented its weight even more as it is among the terms coming to the fore the most, Fuudy’s Baydar said.

Speaking of services that are shaped according to customer experience, he said they have managed to become an e-commerce app where people needing to care about what they eat and drink can get more than one service every month.

"In doing so, we focused on the demands of customers. We also made sure that our employees worked with us for a long time and provided services without forgetting the customer’s place and needs. For this, we also focused on employee loyalty," Baydar noted.

Couriers have been the most important part of the experience, he added.

"We have made an agreement with Akmerkez Makro. Now we also started shopping at the store. We have ensured that the restaurants that people like very much and have high expectations of provide a quality delivery service. Now we also want to deliver the dishes of the restaurants we love with the understanding of 'dark kitchen' to the customers who have difficulty reaching it," he said.

"In other words, we want to enable restaurants to grow by extending their kitchens without the need for new branches."

Cloud service grows

According to NGN’s Öztürk, there has been a booming increase in the need for cloud technology by institutions providing services in education, e-commerce and electronic money.

"During the pandemic, we had difficulty keeping up with the demands of education, e-commerce institutions for cloud service. There has also been a significant increase in demand regarding the electronic money and banking service, which have grown with the entry into force of the digital banking regulation on May 1 and the gain in remote customers," he noted.

Öztürk particularly stressed efforts to gain remote customers, which triggered a major increase in authentication requests.

"Especially when remote customer acquisition caused an increase in authentication requests, an enterprise that receives services from us requested a 50-fold growth in a few months. Frankly, I can say that we are having a hard time even catching up with the demands during this period."

Shaping according to employee experience

TalentMelon’s Ulutaş said organizations that see that the prerequisite of a happy customer as employee happiness do not avoid investing in the employee experience.

Elaborating on trends that developed with the pandemic, she said employees went through a difficult period.

"They were left somehow helpless between the demands of their families, their children and the demands of the workplace. The increase in communication costs at home has also been added to the health problems that have increased with the current pandemic. They had a hard time finding a quiet working environment," Ulutaş noted.

To support the deteriorating psychology of employees, she said some companies have started distributing various training hours, such as psychologists, meditation and yoga.

"Our goal is to support not only large institutions, but also fast-growing enterprises to maintain a healthy human resources structure in order to be successful," Ulutaş said.

Customer-related design to meet clean energy need

The central province Kayseri-based Batron Energy startup is meeting the clean energy needs of institutions and homes.

Moreover, by investing in the highest value-added side of battery production, it ensures the formation of high-tech added value. Specializing in battery technologies and standards, the enterprise designs batteries according to customers’ requirements.

Stating that they started out by offering solutions to the defense industry, Batron Energy co-founder Kaya said that over time, they also started to respond to the clean energy needs of various industrial organizations and homes.

"We ensure that the consumers or institutions using our products are informed without any problems and see how much battery life remains. We follow the whole process over the cloud and inform the customer instantly," said Kaya.

He also said they have identified the increasing need for clean energy in maritime vehicles as well, and that they would soon begin related deliveries.

On how they will evaluate funding they receive, Kaya said: "We have already taken steps for exports. We plan to increase our export capacity after some certification processes and by increasing our production sites."