How IONOS Uses Snowflake AI to Retain 30% of At-Risk Customers

IONOS SE operates one of Europe’s largest web hosting platforms, serving over 6.6 million customers with domains, hosting, website tools, and cloud services across multiple brands. For years, customer data was siloed: care, sales, finance, and product teams each maintained separate data systems with no shared view of a customer’s full journey. Service agents had limited context when fielding calls, marketing teams couldn’t target effectively, and churn often went undetected until it was too late.

The structural problem was both technical and operational. With data fragmented across brands and departments, IONOS could not generate overarching insight into customer behavior, predict which customers were at risk, or identify upsell opportunities at scale. Transcript analysis was manually performed on roughly 1% of the call volume — leaving the other 99% as untapped intelligence.

Six years ago, IONOS migrated to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to consolidate over 150 data sources into a single platform. Snowflake Snowpipe Streaming enables real-time, low-latency data ingestion, replacing the prior once-a-day ETL approach. Dynamic Tables automate data transformation and pipeline management, cutting setup time from hours to minutes. Snowflake Notebooks are used to route 15,000 daily call transcripts to AI models for automated analysis, with results stored centrally and surfaced to agents and sales teams.

The results span the entire customer lifecycle. Automated churn risk analysis identifies at-risk customers before they call to cancel, achieving 50% accuracy and enabling proactive outreach with discounts or alternative product recommendations. The Next Best Offer system provides contact center agents with prioritized upsell recommendations based on ML signals, delivering up to 2x conversion rate uplift. At the point a customer calls to cancel, Snowflake-powered data helps agents retain approximately 30% of those customers through targeted offers.

Looking ahead, IONOS is building custom AI agents within Snowflake to allow senior management to query data directly through natural language, reducing dashboard engineering overhead and enabling more dynamic data exploration. The platform investment has become foundational: as Thomas Krug, Senior Manager of Group Data Management and Applications, put it, without Snowflake the company simply would not be as successful as it is today.