How IONOS Uses Snowflake AI to Retain 30% of At-Risk Customers
IONOS SE, the German web hosting company serving 6.6 million customers, built a unified data foundation on Snowflake to eliminate customer data silos across all brands. AI and machine learning power automated analysis of 15,000 daily call transcripts, ML-driven upsell recommendations, and proactive churn detection — retaining 30% of customers at the point they call to cancel.
Impact
150+
Data sources consolidated
15,000
Daily call transcripts analyzed
30%
Customers retained at cancellation point
Up to 2x
Upsell conversion rate uplift
50%+
Automated churn risk analysis accuracy
Challenge
IONOS operated customer data across disconnected silos spanning multiple brands and departments, preventing unified visibility into customer behavior, limiting transcript analysis to 1% of call volume, and leaving churn risk and upsell opportunities largely undetected across 6.6 million customers.
Solution
IONOS migrated to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, consolidating 150+ data sources with Snowpipe Streaming for real-time ingestion and Dynamic Tables for pipeline automation, then used Snowflake Notebooks to feed 15,000 daily call transcripts into AI models — enabling automated churn detection, ML-powered upsell recommendations, and proactive customer retention at scale.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Before we could analyze around 1% of those transcripts, because it all had to be done manually. 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.”
“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.”
“If we hadn’t invested in Snowflake, we simply wouldn’t be as successful as we are now. 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.”
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Full Story
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.