How MAINGAU transforms Customer Service with agentic AI

MAINGAU is a rapidly growing energy and technology company with over one-million customer relationships across Europe. In addition to electricity and gas distribution, the company offers internet and mobile services, a wide range of products in e-mobility, and operates an online shop.

Challenge

At MAINGAU, voice and chatbots were already in use, reliably handling customer inquiries. When customers asked follow-up questions or deviated from predefined scripts, however, the system broke. With expectations around automation and the complexity of customer requests simultaneously increasing, MAINGAU knew it needed to transition from rule-based support systems to more sophisticated, agentic customer service. 

At this same time, the company was also migrating its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a technologically complex process. This meant that during the transition phase, the new AI agents would need to be able to communicate with both the existing and the new system, of which each also had over 100 associated APIs. These ERPs weren’t the only systems with which the agents needed to integrate, either. Parloa’s AI agents needed to seamlessly integrate into a highly complex system landscape, including systems for sending emails and SMS, a knowledge base for automatic information updating, and APIs for conversation summaries.

Beyond the technology, MAINGAU also had many regulatory requirements that needed to be addressed with the implementation. Compliance rules specific to the energy sector had to be considered, and, because personal information such as energy usage and billing is leveraged in many of the company’s support use cases, validations and rules needed to be incorporated within the agents’ workflows. 

Finally, MAINGAU’s business is highly seasonal, particularly at the end of quarters and the year, when contact volumes significantly increase due to meter readings and installment adjustments.

Against this backdrop, MAINGAU was looking for an AI solution that would provide maximum reliability, flexibility, and scalability. 

Solution

By replacing the previous system with Parloa’s AI agents, MAINGAU achieved its goal of an additional 20% automation rate within a short period of time. The new voice and chat agents communicate dynamically in natural language, understanding the complex inquiries, follow-up questions, special inquiries, and different phrasings that broke the old system.

Parloa’s AI agents are able to handle numerous service requests end-to-end, including meter- reading submissions, installment adjustments, contract renewals, and delivery status updates during electricity provider changes. They also provide tariff advice to customers and automatically send suitable offers via email. Through these workflows, Parloa’s AI agents not only deliver proactive support to increase customer retention, but also open more revenue opportunities for MAINGAU.

Why Parloa?

During the selection process, MAINGAU evaluated several providers. Parloa stood out for its technological advancement. During evaluation, Parloa proved to be the only vendor capable of fully addressing the complexity of the company’s requirements. Its low-code platform was also attractive for allowing MAINGAU teams to easily make adjustments, and its deep integration capabilities ensured seamless scaling and integration. Importantly, the platform also met all relevant legal requirements for the different facets of the company, from GDPR to retention and audit obligations. 

For the implementation, MAINGAU worked closely with Parloa and its implementation specialist partner, logen.ai.

"Through our previous automation solution, we had already built strong internal expertise as well as dedicated IT resources around customer service automation. We were able to leverage this experience for the project and, together with Parloa and logen.ai, develop a solution that is optimally tailored to our service processes while being able to continuously evolve."

Ben Hagelauer, Head of Customer Service Technology & Automation, MAINGAU

Complex technical implementation through close collaboration with Parloa and logen.ai

Parloa’s AI agents were designed to seamlessly integrate into MAINGAU’s existing system landscape. The connection to MAINGAU’s infrastructure is handled via a custom-built connector that consolidates communication with the two ERP systems, Kraken and LIMA. The agents operate through one unified interface per use case, and the connector translates requests into the respective ERP system format, routing requests to the appropriate endpoints. Telephony integration is handled via SIP on MAINGAU’s Session Border Controller (SBC).

By leveraging Parloa’s and logen.ai’s expertise in AI, energy, and integrations, MAINGAU went live with their agentic solution in just a few months, despite the high level of complexity.

“This technological approach fits perfectly with MAINGAU’s innovation strategy. As a modern energy company, we strive to adopt forward-looking technologies at an early stage and take on a pioneering role. Parloa enables dynamic and seamless conversations."

Carsten Streitzig, Head of Customer Service, MAINGAU

Results

Parloa’s AI agents have delivered measurable results from day one:

• +20% automation rate

• Increased customer retention and revenue

• Relief for service employees, enabling them to focus on more complex cases

• Consistently high-quality service, even with fluctuating volumes

• Reduced dependency on external call centers, which tend to incur higher costs than in-house services

• Improved customer experience, especially for follow-up questions and FAQs

Outlook

MAINGAU continues to develop its AI agents, introducing new capabilities and integrating the agents into the MAINGAU app. In the future, the agents will drive up-selling and cross-selling opportunities to further contribute to revenue growth. They will resolve more customer inquiries fully automatically and take on additional tasks in the areas of mobile communications, internet, and e-mobility. The next stages of expansion will focus on leveraging Parloa’s multi-agent capabilities and specialized task agents for more complex processes.