At the recent Xperience in North Amsterdam, I had the pleasure of moderating the artificial intelligence (AI) panel, where three Genesys customers from Germany and Benelux — Callexcell, EWE and IONOS — discussed how they’re using Genesys Cloud AI technologies to deliver results at scale for their customers and employees. Following the morning keynote from Peter Graf, SVP of Strategy at Genesys, on The Levels of Experience Orchestration, we had a lively and interesting discussion.

“It all starts with being in the cloud!” said Michael Sourbron, IT Architect at Callexcell, a business process outsourcing company based in Belgium and Bulgaria. “Once you are in the cloud, everything is possible.”

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It was a fun moment, but also contained the bare fact that AI requires the speed, agility and scale that is only possible with a cloud infrastructure.

Callexcell serves clients across Europe, each with unique needs, languages, knowledge resources and training requirements for staff. Quality of service as well the need to provide business insights are critical to their clients.

Having migrated to the Genesys Cloud™ platform in 2020, Michael cited great business results from Genesys Cloud AI tools, including speech and text analytics, knowledge management and agent assist. While many Callexcell clients already had an organized knowledge base that could be imported into Genesys, for others, the team used transcription analytics to create topics and answers — creating a knowledge base for their clients.

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Michael Sourbron, IT Architect at Callexcell and Carolin Raezer, Head of Strategy and Innovation at IONOS Group.

“You can scrape for frequently asked questions and then look at the conversations happening in the platform, using large language models rather than listening to calls,” said Sourbron.

With agent assist surfacing that knowledge to agents in real time, Callexcell has improved customer satisfaction and made significant improvements to its KPIs. These include reducing average handling time by 20% and decreasing agent training time by up to 50%

“We empower the agents by giving them all the knowledge at their fingertips,” Sourbron said. “It’s especially useful for new advisors — you show them how it works and then they can use it straightaway.”

Advisors also saw good results from this capability, he added. “They love it actually — especially the auto-summarization and real-time transcriptions to support them with different languages.”

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Andreas Bös, Head of Automation and Innovation for Customer Service at EWE, with Carl Thomson, Enterprise Sales Director, Digital and AI, Genesys

Andreas Bös, Head of Automation and Innovation for Customer Service at EWE, an energy provider serving households and businesses, joined us from Germany. EWE has launched a digital front door with a concierge bot that uses natural language understanding for authentication, gathering customer intent and ensuring customers are correctly routed — either to the right bot or human.

It’s an exciting development, noted Bös, and it builds on the company’s earlier successes with using voicebots and chatbots for specific use cases around the transmission of gas and electricity meter readings and the adjustment of monthly installments. These bots were developed during the post-COVID energy crisis, when new regulations and pricing complexity created an unprecedented surge in contact volume that the business simply wasn’t equipped for.

“We’re now able to manage 80% of these use cases via the bot” said Bös Andreas said, which is delivering significant cost savings for the company. The 20% of customers who still need support from an agent typically have more complicated enquiries.

The goal at EWE isn’t to automate every service; humans will always be there for the customers who need that bit of assistance. But for simple requirements, automation represents a win-win, with a faster solution for the customer, too. The concierge bot represents a major step forward in AI capability, not just to drive efficiencies but also create a smooth and more personalized end-to-end customer journey.

On the horizon, Bös said, is most likely to explore using copilots to surface content from the knowledge base and connect with backend systems.

IONOS, Europe’s leading provider of web hosting services, is using Genesys Cloud Predictive Engagement to grow revenue while at the same time being more empathetic to customers in their web browsing journey.

“No more annoying pop ups!” said Carolin Raezer, Head of Strategy and Innovation for the IONOS Group, a global technology company that supports businesses and individuals with growing their online presence. Previously, the company used a standard chat pop-up that had just a 2–3% acceptance rate. But Raezer and her team decided to create a more personalized approach to engagement.

“Predictive engagement analyzes and monitors customer behavior on the website. Then, based on scrolling behavior and dwell time on product information, it pops up with the right offer or information at the right time,” said Raezer.

Having cracked the code in Germany, the IONOS team then rolled it out across additional European markets with fantastic results. IONOS grew its chat acceptance rate to 13%, increased sales conversion rate through chat from 20% to 34% and achieved a revenue per website visit increase of 29%.

At the same time, she said, IONOS has reduced the overall number of chat pop ups by 60%, which means greater efficiency and cost savings.

Excited about what’s possible with AI, IONOS has a live pilot for Genesys Cloud Predictive Routing and is already seeing benefits, with a 12% decrease in AHT in test queues. As noted in Graf’s keynote, Genesys Cloud Predictive Routing is a “no brainer,” since it doesn’t require any configuration. You just turn it on, and it works in the background to match customers with the best suited agent.

It was a privilege to hear these stories of innovation and celebrate the AI milestones at CallExcell, EWE and IONOS. Most satisfying for me was to hear not just the results that our customers are achieving, but also how much personal and professional satisfaction they’re gaining from being at the forefront of customer experience innovation.

“You just need to start and try things,” added Bös from EWE, in his final thought for the audience. “AI needs to be handled carefully, but you have to start somewhere. Just do it.”

Read the “Genesys Cloud AI progressive adoption model” to learn more about Genesys Cloud AI and how to choose an AI solution that works for you.