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IVR Service Provider CreaLog Expands IVR Hosting Offerings to Africa

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor

CreaLog (News - Alert), a Munich-based provider of speech recognition (IVR) and contact center solutions, announced major expansion to Africa.

The IVR service provider has implemented IVR hosting solutions in key markets in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana. The company is also planning to implement other IVR platforms in Nigeria and Tanzania.

The implementation is carried out with the help of CreaLog partners including ONFON MEDIA, D-Mark, Spurs & Galilleo, and CIS Ghana.

The IVR hosting solutions provide telephone subscribers with a broad range of supplementary voice-based services.

Africa is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world. However, mobile access to the Internet is not yet widespread in the country. Simple cell phones dominate the market in Africa with an 80 percent share.

Text messaging and USSD services are the preferred communications channels for value added services. They are not able to support services with more complex content. IVR comes into picture in this context. A telephone call using the voice channel offers significantly better options.

Voice-based services are also beneficial to subscribers who cannot read the text message or who, for other reasons, do not use these services. IVR enables simple and convenient interaction in the subscriber’s own language.

In one of the implementations, Angola’s largest mobile services provider, Unitel SA, has successfully used voice portal technology from CreaLog, in Portuguese and English, for its customer service operations. 

While highlighting the importance of automated and self-service systems like IVR services in a survey of US IT decision makers, Enghouse (News - Alert) Interactive recently said the absence of an online system or a quick IVR system will be perceived fairly negatively by young generation.

According to the survey automated systems and self-service interactions were important to 55 percent of companies, while automated and self-service systems were the dominant form of customer interaction in just 14 percent of companies.

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