Growing revenue with seamless, personalized journeys

Setting a course for seamless journeys

The trusted digital transformation partner for over six million valued customers, IONOS supports small and medium-sized businesses with reliable, innovative cloud solutions that are hosted from its global data centers. This support can involve growing a customer’s online presence by securing a domain; building a website and moving back-office processes to the cloud; and deploying best-in-class apps, servers and technical services.

To stand out in a crowded market, the company set a new course for its customer experience (CX) vision, which supports 10 IONOS brands through a mix of in-house and outsourced operations.

Four years ago, its contact centers ran largely on Avaya and CosmoCom on-premises technology, which was time-consuming and costly to maintain. Productivity and service suffered due to difficulty onboarding new client requirements, standardizing work practices and integrating systems. Accelerating AI and digital innovation presented another significant challenge.

“We wanted to deliver seamless, personalized journeys leveraging AI and other new tech to better understand customer preferences and behaviors,” said Carolin Raezer, Head of Strategy and Innovation at IONOS. “Other important goals were building empathy and rapport, while reducing customer and agent effort.”

Unified channel management

To realize its bold CX strategy and technology refresh, IONOS decided to standardize its contact center operations globally on the Genesys Cloud platform.

“Scalability and ease of integrating our brands is one of the big benefits of Genesys,” said Martin Schmidt, Product Owner and Project Manager at IONOS. “As well as being fast and simple to deploy, we liked the remote working capabilities and constant new feature releases.”

To assist with discovery sessions, developing technical requirements and configuring the system, IONOS used Genesys Professional Services for its migration to Genesys Cloud. The support also included training to upskill agents, and the team worked side by side with IONOS project leaders during the go-live phase. Genesys continues to support IONOS with managing and optimizing its Genesys Cloud environment.

Currently underpinning six IONOS brands — soon rising to all 10 — the new solution enables 2,000 agents and personal consultants in 12 countries to efficiently manage 100,000 weekly inbound, outbound, email and chat conversations.

Topics mostly focus around technical and administrative support, along with sales and retention activities. Agents comfortably handle all this from a single desktop interface with the ability to send customers helpful links, screen share and co-browse IONOS websites in just a few clicks.

Proactive AI-driven offers

The transformation where AI-driven insights are helping to personalize and automate engagement extends across the company’s websites in Germany, France, Spain, the UK and the US.

Previously, IONOS relied on generic automated chat pop-ups. Often perceived as annoying or distracting, the pop-ups were detached from what website visitors were actually doing — acceptance rates were low.

Now, with Genesys Cloud Predictive Engagement, IONOS sales teams make timely chat interventions and tailored offers in real time, based on the customer’s website journey and behaviors, such as their scrolling actions and dwell time spent viewing product information.

Turning chat into a strategic sales driver

Importantly, that data is used to calculate a propensity-to-buy score. Success is measured by two predefined outcomes: the number of customers placing items into their shopping baskets, and the number completing orders and checking out.

“Genesys Cloud AI is very good at determining the best time to engage with the customer,” said Raezer. “As a result, we’ve seen a 10% increase in our chat acceptance rate with Predictive Engagement. And our conversion rate rose from 20% to 34% — a 68% improvement contributing towards a 29% increase in revenue per visit.”

What makes those achievements even more remarkable is that the pop-ups displayed to customers actually reduced by 60% and resulted in a 15% reduction in chat contact handling, ultimately lowering cost to serve.

“Potential sales leads used to get clogged up by customers using chat to seek support,” said Schmidt. “That’s no longer the case. We removed 23% of support-type questions, simply by being able to right-channel chat conversations and engage in a hyperpersonalized way.”

Positioning agents for further success

Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management is enabling IONOS to consolidate quality assurance, compliance monitoring, forecasting, scheduling, analytics and reporting activities into a single solution.

“It’s much easier to evaluate performance among our agents and team leads,” said Schmidt. “In addition to piloting gamification tools, we intend to use sentiment analysis to inform our web developers, product managers and other parts of the business.”

Other planned innovations include using AI to respond to emails and rolling out auto-translation tools, which are currently being tested with Spanish-speaking customers in the US market. In addition, IONOS is also looking to migrate to Genesys Cloud Knowledge Base along with AI-powered routing.

“We’re three months into piloting Genesys Cloud Predictive Routing and the first results look pretty good,” concluded Raezer. “We’ve already seen an AHT decrease of around 12% for the queues where we tested Predictive Engagement. The overall time for the customer from call to resolution has decreased by around 90 seconds. We also see a positive NPS impact and are currently evaluating this further.”