News03 July 2023

Three Decades of Innovation in Voice Technology and Telecommunications (Unitel)

Angola's largest mobile operator UNITEL, with more than six million customers, commissions CreaLog to build a comprehensive customer care portal, prevailing against strong international competition.

2009: major contract for CreaLog from Africa

With innovative technology from Germany, UNITEL rebuilds its central customer service from the ground up. For this solution, CreaLog deploys state-of-the-art speech recognition in Portuguese and English. Announcements are delivered using speech synthesis with a Corporate Voice - the individual voice of a real person, created specifically for UNITEL. CreaLog Managing Director Michael Kloos sees this major contract from Africa as confirmation of his company's global focus on carrier solutions: "We are delighted to have won UNITEL, Angola's leading telecommunications provider, as a new customer."

In choosing CreaLog, the customer places particular importance on the platform's stability and integration capability. The solution also stands out with the following highlights:

simple browser-based administration, which lets UNITEL create up-to-date announcements itself using speech synthesis,
the VXML development environment, which UNITEL uses to further develop the customer care services built by CreaLog.

Valuable services from pre-qualification to fault management

At the heart of the CreaLog applications is intelligent pre-qualification of UNITEL customers. In addition, numerous further speech recognition services are implemented:

Information on card balance and top-up
Tariff information for prepaid and postpaid
Information in case of a lost mobile phone
Activation of services (SMS, mobile TV and push mail)
FAQ services on voicemail, MMS, internet and data services
Fault management services

Musical messages

After the successful launch with the large VoiceBot for customer care, a CreaLog mass-calling platform has also been in successful use at UNITEL since 2009. In 2014, the mobile operator used this platform to market exclusive, especially low-priced smartphone packages for female customers during Angola's Women's Month. Customers could also request three songs by the well-known artist Anselmo Ralph as a musical serenade via SMS and forward them to the phone of a loved one.

Current projects on many levels

Since 2016, UNITEL has been running several e-health initiatives on the CreaLog platform: more than 60 million SMS messages and over four million voice messages are sent on topics such as 'Stop Malaria', 'COVID-19' and road safety. Starting in 2017, the Angolan company sends dynamic voice messages for the 'Mobile Midwife' project in the national languages Portuguese and Umbundu. The messages contain important information for mother and newborn, ranging from hygiene and nutrition tips to reminders of the baby's next medical check-up.

Mobile voting for a talent show

In 2018, the talent show 'Estrelas ao Palco' (Stars on Stage) launched, with voting possible by phone, SMS and the "Idolos Angola" app. The system processes 2,000 SMS per second and up to 2,100 parallel voice calls.

HIV/AIDS prevention through "Born Free to Shine"

was the title of a joint project by UNITEL, People in Need and CreaLog in 2022. As patron of this large-scale health campaign, the First Lady of the Republic of Angola, Ana Dias Lourenço, aims to drastically reduce the rate of new HIV infections among babies in her country. Under the motto 'Born Free to Shine', HIV-positive mothers receive voice messages explaining how they can prevent transmitting their HIV infection to their newborn. CreaLog built the corresponding messenger service on behalf of UNITEL back in December 2021.

Download the Unitel case study