CUSTOMER STORIES
IONOS Drives Sales and Improves Retention With 360-Degree Customer Visibility
With Snowflake AI and Machine Learning, IONOS empowers service agents to quickly resolve customer issues, reduce churn and grow revenue.
150Data sources consolidated
15kCall transcripts a day analyzed
Industry
TechnologyLocation
Montabaur, GermanyUsing data to deliver exceptional customer support
In customer-facing industries, managing relationships and support interactions is essential for staying at the top of the game. The time it takes to identify, troubleshoot and resolve issues for users can be the difference between planting the seeds for brand loyalty or watching customers walk away. Take too long and the business will suffer. Solve problems promptly and reputations will soar. But what if you could resolve issues before they’re even reported?
IONOS SE is a global web hosting company trusted by over 6.6 million customers of all sizes to bring their ideas to life. From providing domains and hosting to helping customers build websites, the group delivers a variety of powerful products so people and companies can make the most of their online presence. These include AI-powered website design and a receptionist service, sovereign cloud hosting and e-commerce support. For every customer, these products and services are delivered with the support of a dedicated service agent.
To provide the most targeted and timely customer interactions across marketing, sales and support, IONOS needed a centralized data foundation that would eradicate the silos in its customer care, sales, marketing and product departments. Six years ago, the company migrated to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to centralize customer data and gain granular insights into usage and activity. In doing so, IONOS has boosted revenue through targeted marketing and sales interactions, improved customer satisfaction and retention with personalized support services and gained insight into users’ issues before they reach out for support.
Story highlights
Gaining a complete view of customer activities: With Snowflake, IONOS has eradicated data silos and built a single point of truth to better understand and cater to customers.
Improving service and sales interactions to drive revenue and retention: With centralized customer data, IONOS helps its service teams resolve issues faster, upsell the most relevant products and retain 30% of customers calling to cancel.
- Boosting revenue with intelligent upselling: Using machine learning algorithms with Snowflake data, IONOS can transcribe service interactions to improve products and sales pitches, automatically identify next best-fit products to improve upselling and uncover key customer details for more targeted marketing interactions.
Building a foundation for better customer experiences
Knowing what customers need and want is the key to delivering experiences that drive brand loyalty and grow revenue. That’s why gaining visibility into customer behavior and understanding user journeys are priorities for IONOS. But the company’s analytics originally relied on disparate and disconnected data sets, which made it impossible to gain overarching insight into customer behaviours and needs.
“Our various brands had data silos spread across departments like customer care, sales and finance at various brands,” says Thomas Krug, Senior Manager of Group Data Management and Applications at IONOS. “Our plan was to unite that data so we could gain the most detailed insights into customer activities.”
To build a foundation for business analysis and operational reporting, IONOS first needed to replace a distributed data infrastructure containing various data silos spread throughout the company. With Snowflake, on AWS, the group has consolidated over 150 sources of data across all of its brands into a centralized platform. The result is a 360-degree view of customers, contracts and domains.
However, consolidating data was only half the battle. For IONOS to extract maximum value from this data, it must be delivered quickly, as well as centrally.
“We started with a classic ETL approach where we’d transport large amounts of data to Snowflake once a day,” says Krug. “But to respond to customer needs more quickly, we needed to consume more event-based data, which meant ingesting it in real time.”
To achieve this, IONOS uses Snowflake Snowpipe Streaming to continuously load low-latency data directly into Snowflake and provide visibility into user activity in near real time. The company also uses dynamic tables to simplify data transformation and pipeline management for even faster time-to-insight with minimal engineering effort.
“Setting up a dynamic table takes a matter of minutes. The alternative would be hours,” says Laurent Beck, Manager of Data Engineering at IONOS. “We also save a huge amount of maintenance time, which allows our engineers to focus on more technical requirements than just keeping the lights on.”
Powering timely, relevant interventions with AI insights
As an increasingly AI-focused company, it’s no surprise that IONOS is using AI and machine learning to power its sales, marketing and service interactions.
The data team already uses Snowflake Notebooks to send call transcriptions for over 15,000 interactions a day to an AI model hosted in its cloud. Those results are then stored in Snowflake, centralizing details around recurring product issues or the success of sales pitches. This information is then used to improve products, deliver more personalized interactions and establish best practices among sales and service teams.
With this insight, IONOS can also better identify at-risk customers before they decide to cancel their subscriptions, allowing for proactive outreach. “Before we could analyze around 1% of those transcripts, because it all had to be done manually,” says Beck. “Now, we can do 100%. It helps us automate the analysis of churn risk with at least 50% accuracy, so we’re now much better at reaching out to customers where they are and when we most need to.”
Another machine learning win is the ability to provide contact center agents with an automated and prioritized list of products for upselling opportunities, called Next Best Offer, so the most relevant products and services are always presented to customers. At IONOS, such ML-based recommendations have delivered up to 2x conversion rate uplift in recent years.
Elsewhere, IONOS uses AI to automatically identify a customer’s industry so it can personalize marketing and sales activities, targeting common industry needs or pain points. For instance, for customers that have booking systems, sales agents or marketing campaigns can have an AI-powered receptionist recommended as part of their IONOS experience. This means users can concentrate on delivering their services, instead of fielding calls and organizing appointments.
By using Snowflake data with our machine learning algorithms, we can provide agents with instant insight into what products are most suited to our customers for upselling and cross-selling. It’s been a real game-changer for our retention team.”
Laurent Beck
Manager of Data Management at IONOS
Driving customer retention with proactive insights
AI isn’t the only way IONOS is using Snowflake to prevent churn. A bad customer experience can quickly lead to lost customers, but sometimes the warning signs that a user is about to leave can be buried in the details.
“We’re collecting data, in line with GDPR regulations, about how our customers use our products — but also how they’re not using them,” says Krug. “We learned over the years that if a customer buys a product and doesn’t start using it within a certain period of time, they’ll eventually cancel.”
By using Snowflake data to understand how products are used, IONOS can flag any instances where churn could be a risk and reach out to those customers with preventative measures such as discounts or alternative product recommendations.
Those interventions are data-driven, too, which is a major contributor to the group’s award-winning customer support. With Snowflake, agents get recommendations for the best discounts and alternative products to offer customers. As a result, the group retains around 30% of its customers at the point they call to cancel their subscriptions.
With timely data, IONOS can also resolve customer issues more quickly, which prevents much of the frustration that can quickly lead to churn. One of the most meaningful indicators of good customer support is how quickly issues are resolved. Today, Snowflake insights, pulled directly from customer activity, allow dedicated service agents to understand issues as they happen, long before those customers reach out for help. The result is a truly seamless experience that elevates satisfaction and minimizes the likelihood of lost customers and revenue.
With Snowflake, we collect data on failed actions and provide that information to agents before they even pick up the phone. This means we have a head start in resolving issues and can instantly escalate more technical issues to different levels of support, without the customer having to be passed from pillar to post.”
Thomas Krug
Senior Manager of Group Data Management and Applications at IONOS
Building a future at the forefront of exceptional customer relationships
IONOS is just getting started on its Snowflake journey. As they plan for the future for the future, it intends to use additional Snowflake features to make data even more accessible to its senior decision-makers, including the LLM capabilities of Snowflake Intelligence.
“We’re building our own AI agents in Snowflake to allow senior management to talk to data,” says Krug. “It will reduce the time our engineers spend building dashboards for reporting and allow business leaders to explore data in new and more interesting ways.”
All this information enables IONOS to provide the service levels and products that keep its customers loyal. With insight into every customer interaction, the group powers its award-winning customer support, identifies issues before they’re even reported, drives sales and targets marketing activities more effectively. But beyond that, it helps those customers build websites that make a vital first impression in the world of online business — and leave their mark on the world.
“If we hadn’t invested in Snowflake, we simply wouldn’t be as successful as we are now,” says Krug. “Having that central data and intelligence platform is driving revenue and success. And its simplicity means we can do more with a small data team.”
