Current news

04.11.09 | CreaLog gewinnt mit Cabfish internationale Awards:
Zwei Auszeichnungen durch die VMA Conference und Dialogic  

München -  Die Lösung basiert auf modernster Sprachtechnologie - und gewinnt einen Preis nach dem anderen: 'Cabfish - der intelligente Taxiruf' wurde jetzt auf der europäischen VMA Conference in Zürich mit einer Silbermedaille ausgezeichnet und gewann fast zeitgleich den zweiten Platz beim weltweiten "Dialogic Innovator Award 2009". Auf nationaler Ebene hatte CreaLog mit 'Cabfish' bereits beim Voice Contest 2008 den ersten Platz errungen.

Dialogic gratuliert CreaLog
Jim Machi, Senior Vice President Marketing bei Dialogic, gratulierte CreaLog zum Sprung aufs Siegerpodest: "Die Jury hat CreaLog für diese hoch moderne Mobiltelefon-Lösung ausgezeichnet, weil sich damit auf ungewöhnliche Weise ein alltägliches Problem lösen lässt." Das hat man bei der 'VMA Conference 2009' in Zürich offensichtlich ähnlich gesehen: Die Juroren des Internationalen Telco-Verbandes ('International Association for Enhanced Voice Services')  setzten die intelligente Sprachlösung von CreaLog auf den zweiten Platz.

'Cabfish' ruft die Taxizentrale...
...durch einfaches Drücken des Taxi-Icons auf einem GPS-fähigen Mobiltelefon
(z. B. i-Phone).
Eine ebenso intelligente wie komfortable Lösung, bei der mit aktueller Sprachtechnologie das Taxi bei der örtlichen Zentrale in der jeweiligen Landessprache bestellt wird. Zugleich informiert das System die Zentrale über die genaue Abholadresse - und sendet die Bestätigung inklusive der voraussichtlichen Ankunftszeit auf das Mobiltelefon des Bestellers. So erledigt das Voice Portal als 'Taxibutler' im Hintergrund den kompletten Bestellvorgang für den Kunden.

27.10.09 | High tech Voice Portal for Angola
Angola's largest mobile provider UNITEL awards major contract to CreaLog

UNITEL SA, Angola's largest mobile provider with over six million subscribers, today announced that it has commissioned CreaLog, the Munich-based specialist company, with the implementation of a comprehensive Voice Portal System. In the course of a challenging selection process, CreaLog was able to stake its claim against tough international competition – and pick up one of the largest orders in its history. Thanks to the highly innovative technology from Germany, the fast-growing UNITEL will completely restructure its central customer service, deploying state-of-the-art voice recognition technology in both Portuguese and English.

Explaining the decision in favor of CreaLog, UNITEL CEO Amilcar Safeca said:
"The rapid expansion of our customer base requires the latest capabilities and services, which is why we opt for partnerships with top-performing market leaders who enable us to offer our users the best and most advanced services on the market."

Michael Kloos, Managing Director at CreaLog, sees the major contract from Africa as vindication of the global strategy at his company.
"With UNITEL, we are delighted to have won the leading telecoms provider in Angola as a new customer. When it came to the crunch, our client was highly impressed with the stability and integratability of the platform. What the UNITEL people really liked was the straightforward browser-based administration system which can be used to update messages via speech synthesis on a daily basis. And, of course, they like our VXML development environment which UNITEL will use to further develop the customer care applications that we supply."

"Last but not least," Mr. Kloos concluded, "we are thrilled to have beaten off such strong competition from Israel, Europe and the USA."

Technical information
Redundantly designed and networked, the CreaLog Voice Portal for the UNITEL customer service will initially provide 2,400 channels. It is connected via SS7 to an Ericsson Mobile Switching Center (MSC) and has a multilingual speech recognition component as well as Text-To-Speech (TTS). The redundant system architecture is distributed over two locations. Operations are based on SNMP.

Services information
The nerve center of the CreaLog application is the intelligent prequalification of the UNITEL customers. Many other voice recognition services are also in place:

• Information about card account status and top-up facility
• Information about Prepaid and Postpaid rates
• Service activation – text messaging, mobile TV and push mail etc.
• FAQs service for voicemail, MMS, internet and data service use
• Network Fault Management
• Intelligent marketing campaign management

About UNITEL
Since the start-up of its GSM service in April 2001, UNITEL SA has led the mobile telecoms market in Angola. Today, UNITEL provides area coverage in all 18 provinces and thus serves over six million subscribers.

30.06.09 | Kelag with voice portal for prepaid electricity customers

With group revenues of € 934 million in 2007 and about 1400 employees, Kelag is among the largest industrial operations in Kärnten, Austria. The company is active throughout Austria as a provider of electricity and natural gas. Its subsidiary KELAG Wärme GmbH is a successful player in the heating business in all of Austria.

Many of Kelag’s customers purchase “prepaid electricity”. This involves a special meter on which they can load credits. With each credit charge they receive a code which must be entered in the prepaid meter to unlock the electricity supply.

The reason for this is that many customers want stricter cost control of their electricity bills. For others, this reduces the risk of a meter interruption by the provider.

In order to relieve the service center of the work involved with issuing the number codes, in the future Kelag will use a voice portal for this purpose.

Here the voice portal checks the database during the dialog with the customer to determine whether that customer is approved for receiving issued codes. If the customer has always paid bills on time in the past, credit is granted once again and a new code is issued which can be entered immediately in the meter. If, on the other hand, there are delinquencies, the customer is forwarded to a service to clear matters up.

17.06.09 | Cisco Expo 2009:
CreaLog wins a silver medal with the intelligent taxi calling system "Cabfish"

CreaLog is particularly pleased about its latest award: at the 2009 Cisco Expo which recently ended in Hanover, the CreaLog solution "Cabfish – the Intelligent Taxi Call System" won the silver medal. This innovative, location-based service for mobile telephones makes it as easy as can be for a customer to call a cab. A voice portal with speech recognition in the background handles the taxi order in the particular national language. The principle of the solution can be applied to other sectors as well, such as ordering service.

05.06.09 | Sparda Bank Voice Portal:
The fastest funds transfer in Europe

Nuremberg / Munich - Sparda Bank reports a “European record” of a special kind: many users of their telephone banking system need just 45 seconds to complete a funds transfer. This includes dialing the voice portal, secure authentication, the transfer order itself and order confirmation. Compare this record time to Internet banking! There it takes longer just to boot the PC.

The following example shows how such a turbo transfer works for the customers of Sparda Bank Nürnberg, Sparda Bank West and numerous other partner banks.

• The customer is authenticated for telephone banking with Sparda Bank using the account number and telephone PIN.
• After the balance is stated, the transfer is initiated with a single sentence, such as “I would like to transfer 27 euros and 35 cents to Paula Marks”.
• The Sparda telephone banking system confirms the entry and asks for the purpose.
• At the end, the caller confirms the transaction briefly. That’s all!

Simply intelligent – intelligent simplicity
This fast, customer-friendly transfer is made possible by state-of-the-art speech technology and high quality voice dialog design. And of course by an intelligent solution concept developed jointly by Sparda Bank and the voice portal specialists at CreaLog.

More than 12 million calls annually – impressive performance for the Sparda Bank voice portal – and usage is growing. Every Sparda Bank customer has a list of his or her most important transfer recipients. This list can be used both on the Internet and during telephone banking. Now if the caller speaks a name from this favorites list, the system knows the associated account number and bank sort code and the purpose (which can of course be modified). Then the voice dialog system adds the monetary amount detected, and the transfer is complete!

Only 25 seconds more!
Mario Kraus, who as the Head of Media Sales was given the bank marketing award for Sparda Bank Nürnberg eG in 2007, reported a further record number: "Our customers require only about 25 seconds for each transfer after that. That’s probably the absolute world record!"

25.05.09 | New partnership with Genesys
Award-winning Voice Portal solutions now also available to Genesys customers.
Munich - CreaLog offers ready to use solutions with high customer acceptance, particularly for banks, utilities and telcos. In Germany, the CreaVoice^® Banking solution, running at many banks, counts 30 million callers a year.

Customer-oriented Voice Portals with Genesys
The focus of the new partnership with Genesys is on VoiceXML solutions. The award-winning voice user interface design and professional voice dialogs by CreaLog experts is now also available for the Genesys Contact Center Suite.

CreaLog customized solutions and the established CreaLog industry and standard solutions are offered to Genesys customers.

CreaLog VXML solutions for all platforms
This new partnership is a consequence of the open
CreaLog VoiceXML architecture. Even better integration of CreaLog solutions with Genesys products is guaranteed.

Voice applications, browser-based administration and development tools are no longer only available for the TUEV certified CreaLog VXML platform. CreaLog VXML solutions can now be operated on all other VXML Platforms.

CreaLog at G-Force 2009 in Barcelona
Visit us on June 9-11 at the G-Force in Barcelona

Franz Hennemann,
Senior Channel Manager,
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories GmbH

"Genesys is pleased to have CreaLog among its partners and integrators. The experience from more than 400 projects and the Voice User Interface Design and VoiceXML knowledge of the CreaLog experts, can now also be used for the Genesys Voice Portal."

08.04.09 | Cisco Expo 2009 in Hanover
CreaLog is the new Cisco technology partner for voice automation on the phone

Munich - At the Cisco Expo 2009 in Hanover, the new technology partners Cisco and CreaLog show, how voice self-service solutions at leading companies save costs and delight customers. Through the partnership the know-how from over 400 CreaLog voice automation projects with award winning customer acceptance is made available for Cisco clients on the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) platform. On 28 and 29 April the companies demonstrate in live presentations, how voice solutions by CreaLog effectively complement Cisco's Unified Communications portfolio.

Already for the fourth time, experts, Cisco partners, customers and individuals from business and politics meet on the Cisco Expo in Hanover. Under the motto "Collaborate. Innovate. Experience" the Congress is dedicated to the power of innovation of new technologies and applications. The focus is on the supporting role of IT technologies for Germany and for its global competitiveness.

A perfect platform
CreaLog CEO Wolfgang Rebert, who supports the congress with a speech titled "Better service, lower costs - Voice automation on the phone", has welcomed the new technology partnership: "The Cisco Expo provides us with a perfect platform to demonstrate our competitiveness in more than 400 voice automation projects to a broad audience. As the German market leader for voice portals, we present at the Cisco Expo with live shows the current state of speech technology in the sectors of financial services providers, call centers and service desks, utilities, telcos, the media and in public administration."

Manfred Bauer,
Regional Channel Manager,
Cisco Systems GmbH

"We welcome CreaLog as new technology partner. The long-standing CreaLog experience with voice portals in Europe helps us to reach our objectives in the contact center sector. According to our motto: Connect, Collaborate and Communicate."

05.02.09 | Nuance and CreaLog start quality and price attack

Attractive Package Rates in temporally limited offer

Munich. A novel quality and price attack for voice portal solutions is launched by partners Nuance and CreaLog at the CallCenter World 2009: This limited special offer combines a very attractive package of speech recognition software by Nuance and voice portal solutions that are exclusively marketed by CreaLog.

The campaign aims at companies that plan to buy a new voice portal or to upgrade an existing system at an attractive price. It includes the latest generation of speech recognition, the Nuance Recognizer v9, and the voice portal hard- and software by CreaLog.

The offer from Nuance and CreaLog facilitates the transition from a pure touch tone IVR (Interactive Voice Response) or a system with outdated speech recognition, to a new, customer-friendly solution with state-of-the-art technology. With the Nuance Recognizer callers can utter their wishes very colloquial and are still easily understood by the Voice Portal. The Voice portals are implemented by CreaLog experts who add their experience from multi-award-winning, international customer solutions from over 30 industries to the joint offer with Nuance.

Study proves: Customer-Friendly Voice Portals important for a company’s success
The main advantage of the offer: Latest Voice Portal solutions for customer self-service lead to a significantly improved customer acceptance and satisfaction. The cumbersome "Push the 1 for x, press the 2 for y. ..." does no longer apply by using the latest speech recognition. The attractive prices of this limited special package are another plus for potential buyers.

A Harris Interactive survey, commissioned by Nuance in 2008, shows: Poor customer service has a negative impact on the company image. According to the study, the quality of customer service has a "very large" or "extremely large" impact on the perception of a company for 58 percent of the respondents. High quality and customer-friendly voice portals are therefore immensely important for the customer and contribute decisively to the success of a company.

Improve the service even further
"The time is ripe for such a quality attack," says CreaLog CEO Michael Kloos, "because only a voice portal with top speech recognition and dialog is well accepted by the users. And this acceptance is a prerequisite for an optimal customer service in our more than 400 projects so far. The attractive package prices will help ensure that even more companies and institutions, can benefit from optimal voice solutions for their customer service!"
This assessment is shared by Michael-Maria Bommer, General Manager DACH of Nuance Communications. He adds: "The customer requires an efficient and fast service, regardless of whether he wants to discuss a request by phone or to perform an entire speech enabled transaction. A simple example: No one queues any longer at the cashier's desk to withdraw money during the opening times of his bank. Just as well, the customer service by phone must not only be easily accessible for the customer but also convenient and easy to use.