SMS messages sent annually across the Netherlands and Belgium
Messaging, payments and AI running on one platform
To launch an AI phishing verification agent
coeo is a European debt collection agency operating across nine countries and serving clients in sectors such as utilities, telecom, mobility and financial services.
Every year, the company manages millions of customer interactions while balancing customer experience, compliance and operational efficiency in a highly regulated industry. By combining technology with human expertise, coeo helps organizations recover outstanding payments while maintaining positive customer relationships.
To support its growth across Europe, the company continuously invests in innovation that simplifies operations, improves customer communication and enables teams to work more efficiently across markets.
coeo came to CM.com for a better SMS provider. It ended up moving all of its customer communication and payments onto one platform.
In a business where margin is under constant pressure, that kind of consolidation is what lets coeo keep getting more efficient, year after year, without letting the customer experience slip.
The result is less operational overhead, fewer moving parts, and a foundation coeo can keep building on as it scales across Europe."
coeo's challenge was never growth. It was protecting margin while growing.
In debt collection, the fees an agency can charge are fixed by regulation and they haven't moved in over a decade. Staffing, compliance and operational costs, meanwhile, keep rising. The result is a structural squeeze: to deliver the same quality at the same price, coeo has to become measurably more efficient every single year. Efficiency isn't a goal here. It's the cost of standing still.
That pressure only intensified as the business scaled. Operating across nine countries meant managing different regulations, languages and customer expectations, all while handling millions of customer interactions a year. And because messaging, payments, customer service and automation each sat with a different vendor, every new market added more tools, more contracts and more complexity to manage.
For a business where every margin point matters, that fragmentation was the opposite of efficient. coeo needed to simplify its technology landscape, support customers across every channel, and let its teams work faster as volumes grew without the cost base growing with them.
We've effectively been living off the same fee for over a decade. Every year we have to become more efficient just to stand still. That's not optional, it's structural.
Ruben Michielsen, Project & Quality Manager, coeo
The relationship started small. coeo was looking for a more reliable SMS provider, and wanted to settle by invoice rather than card, the way it actually runs its business. That modest entry point became the first thread of a far bigger strategy.
As coeo expanded across Europe, it kept consolidating onto the same platform: messaging first, then payments, customer service and AI. For a business where every margin point matters, a single partner is an efficiency strategy in itself, fewer vendors, less complexity, one point of contact, and real negotiating room on cost. And one shared foundation means new use cases can be added in days, not rebuilt from scratch.
Today, HALO, Mobile Service Cloud and Payments work together as one connected communication layer, supporting customers and agents across multiple countries and languages.
One platform for messaging, payments, customer service and AI
Customer communication across every channel, country and language
AI agents handling payment arrangements, enquiries and phishing verification
A scalable foundation that turns new use cases into days, not months
One of the most common reasons customers contact coeo is to arrange a payment plan. Previously, these requests required agent involvement and manual processing. Today, HALO handles most of the process based on business rules, giving customers a faster response while reducing operational workload. Requests that fall outside those rules still go to an agent for manual assessment.
Result: Customers can arrange payments 24/7 without waiting for an agent.
Verifies customer identity in real time
Retrieves balances and payment options
Creates payment arrangements automatically
Escalates exceptions with full context
When a large-scale phishing campaign targeted coeo's customers, call volumes spiked overnight. Agents were losing a big part of their day just confirming whether messages were genuine. Instead of throwing more people at it, coeo built a dedicated HALO agent, reusing the same foundation, which is why it went live in days, not weeks.
Result: A live AI agent deployed in two days, freeing agents for legitimate conversations.
Requests the customer's case file number
Checks it against live case data
Confirms whether the communication is genuine
Deflects phishing enquiries from agents
The results speak for themselves.
of online payments processed through CM.com
SMS messages sent annually across NL and Belgium
per agent per day deflected during peak fraud volumes
Payment arrangements handled without waiting for an agent
As coeo expands into new markets, customer communication processes no longer need to be rebuilt from scratch. New channels, countries and use cases can be added on top of an existing platform, helping the organisation scale more efficiently across Europe.
Those numbers aren't the result of one big project. They're the sum of individual use cases that each ran on the same platform, the same customer context, the same foundation, so every new one started further ahead than the last. Instead of solving one problem at a time, coeo was quietly building a model that could absorb the next one.
What makes that model hold is who runs it. Because HALO can be configured, tested and refined in-house, ownership stayed inside the business. The team doesn't wait on external development for every new agent, they design and improve them themselves, getting faster and more confident with each iteration.
That's what turns automation into an efficiency engine. Every new use case takes less time and effort than the one before it and in a business where efficiency has to improve every year, that compounding is exactly the point.
With the foundation in place, coeo's focus is shifting from solving individual problems to scaling proven automation across more channels and markets:
Automating more inbound customer communication with HALO
Rolling out WhatsApp automation
Activating RCS for outbound debt collection campaigns
Exploring Voice AI in the Netherlands
"Make sure the partner you choose can grow with you into markets you haven't entered yet. We started with SMS and ended up with AI, payments and a platform that follows us across Europe."
Ruben Michielsen, Project & Quality Manager, coeo
Ruben: "Don't wait until everything is perfect. Start, observe and improve. Every new use case teaches you something, and every iteration makes the next one easier."
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