Company:
Unifique is an internet and telephone service provider operating in southern Brazil. In the competitive telecommunications landscape, both customer acquisition and retention are critical to the business.
Problem:
Making the portability journey easier not only increases customer satisfaction by removing friction at this initial stage of their interaction with the carrier, but also directly contributes to churn reduction. Customers who port their numbers are proven to have a lower propensity to cancel and tend to stay longer with the company.
In Unifique's current context, the sales team was facing challenges, especially when selling plans with multiple lines, due to a bureaucratic and time-consuming process that led to lost sales and dissatisfied customers right at the beginning of their experience with the carrier.
Main Goals:
Make incoming portability easier for customers who are members of multi-line plans.
Simplify the flow by eliminating operational costs and giving customers more autonomy.
Allow customers to recover from errors directly through the app, without needing to contact support.
Ensure that the designed solution complies with Anatel regulations.
My role:
I led the discovery process and problem definition based on data and interviews with the sales team.
I collaborated on redesigning the portability flow and validating the solution and its new business rules with the PM, engineering, and legal teams.
🔍 Process:
The project initially reached the product team as:
“We need to make ownership transfer easier by offering it directly in the app”
However, the discovery process revealed that the real issue was the complexity of the portability process for customers with additional lines and the lack of autonomy to correct errors during the process.
👟 Steps:
Research with the Sales Team:
I conducted interviews with sales managers to gain a deep understanding of how the existing process impacted both the sales team and our customers. The insights gathered were synthesized into a journey flow and brought to discussions with the PM and Tech Lead.
Highlighting the following pain points:
Although the portability request was made through the app, only the plan admin could complete it—both for themselves and for the members.
To complete the process, all ported lines needed to be linked to the admin's CPF (Brazilian Individual Taxpayer Registry), requiring an ownership transfer.
This led to customer loss, as many gave up once they found out they would need to transfer the ownership of their lines.
In addition, to finalize sales of multi-line plans, the sales team often had to visit the customer's home to collect signatures for the ownership transfer, increasing operational costs.
For those who agreed to the ownership transfer, the process between signing and completing portability took more than 12 days.
During this time, many customers would forget to respond to the confirmation SMS, which could arrive at any moment, adding friction to the experience.
Alignment with the Legal Team
Consultation with the legal team revealed that the existing process was not fully compliant with Anatel regulations. The regulation requires that the phone number must always be linked to the person who actually uses it, regardless of who is financially responsible for the contract.
Additionally, we identified that this issue also affects other carriers, which often maintain incorrect customer records.
Examples of failure scenarios when porting a number:
Scenario 1: Incorrect registration with the originating carrier prevents portability.
Mary is the admin of a plan with three lines at carrier X, which she shares with João and Leo. All lines are registered under her CPF.
John is unable to port his number to another carrier, even though he is the rightful user of that line.
Scenario 2: Unifique required all numbers to be registered under the same CPF.
Mary is a Unifique customer and wants to add Leo to her multi-line plan.
Leo has an individual line with another carrier and agrees to join Mary's plan at Unifique.
Since the number is under his own CPF, Leo can only bring it to Unifique by signing an ownership transfer agreement, effectively transferring his number to Mary.
Data analysis:
To support the decision to prioritize this improvement, I analyzed dashboards in Power BI. The data showed that 18% of portability requests in the past 3 months were denied due to process errors—this doesn’t even account for lost contracts from people who didn’t want to transfer ownership of their number to someone else in order to join Unifique’s plans.
Main reasons:
40% due to invalid CPF (CPF registered with the originating carrier differs from the one provided to the receiving carrier).
38% due to lack of response to the confirmation SMS.
Direct impact on churn:
Customers who completed the portability process were up to 3x less likely to cancel compared to those who didn’t go through it.
🏁 Solution and new business rules:
The proposed solution focused on separating fiscal responsibility from number ownership, as follows:
The plan admin remains solely responsible for the offer and payment.
Each person on the plan becomes responsible for their own number, with their CPF linked to it.
Any member of the plan can initiate a portability request.
Back-end adjustments enabled the system to differentiate between the account admin and the number owner.
In cases of invalid CPF errors, the customer can now edit the request information and go through a “responsibility check.” This was only possible because ABR Telecom already sends a confirmation SMS, ensuring fraud protection.
Before:
Only the contract admin could initiate a portability request.
After:
Any user on the plan can initiate a portability request.
Before:
Non-editable fields; all lines had to be linked to the admin's CPF.
After:
Editable fields allow input of third-party data with responsibility validation.
*Visual differences are due to updates in the Design System and other initiatives I also led, such as the Home redesign.
🎯 Impact and Results:
Client
Autonomy: Customers on multi-line plans can now initiate their own portability requests without having to give up ownership of their number.
Error Recovery: Even if the registration is incorrect with the originating carrier (e.g., the line is under another CPF), the customer can still bring the number to Unifique by entering the data as registered with the original carrier and digitally accepting a responsibility agreement.
90% Satisfaction: After implementing the new flow and business rules, we tracked customer satisfaction through an in-app survey, reaching a 90% approval rating.
Business
Operational Efficiency: Reduced costs related to in-person collection of ownership transfer signatures, as well as the previous timeline of up to 12 days for completing the process and portability. Now, all customers can complete portability within the 3-day window required by Anatel.
Legal Compliance: Full adherence to Anatel regulations, mitigating legal risks.
Sales Improvement: The sales team can stay focused on new prospects.
20.59% increase in the base of ported customers, rising from 51% to 61.5% of the total customer base.
✨ Learnings:
Clear Diagnosis Is Key: Sometimes, the best work we can do is identifying how to create the greatest impact with the least effort. The customer didn’t need an ownership transfer process—they needed autonomy and agility.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Involving legal and engineering from the start ensured clear alignment and agile execution.
© Daniele Maria Horning • 2025