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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

Realise your ambition! Connect with your local community of digital leaders.

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 9-9-25 Squad Only Physical english

Fixing the Data Foundations ; Making data trustworthy, consistent, and ready for action

As Belgium navigates the complexities of GDPR and various data sovereignty regulations, organizations across multiple industries face both challenges and opportunities in managing their data across borders. The quest for compliance often intersects with the need for business growth, raising questions about the balance between protection and progress. How can companies effectively own and safeguard their data while ensuring compliance without stifling innovation and expansion in a multi-industry landscape?

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Belgium 11-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english

Customer Experience at the Frontline ; Designing digital tools that actually work

You’ve built the portal. Added the chatbot. Rolled out self-service. But your support lines are still ringing. And your frontline teams are still improvising. If you want digital services to feel seamless, not just look polished, this session brings you back to where value is felt: at the frontline.

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Belgium 13-9-25 All Members Physical english

CIONET Cycling Event

Join us for a scenic ride along the route of the Brabantse Pijl!This ride is suitable for all levels of cyclists and doesn’t require advanced technical skills. We’ll start at de Zoete Waters, where parking is available, and head into the charming Brabant region. Along the way, we’ll tackle some of the area’s iconic climbs — including the legendary Moskesstraat, known for its cobbled character and history in pro cycling. Expect a relaxed, friendly atmosphere and beautiful views throughout. Whether you're training, exploring, or just riding for fun, you’re more than welcome to join!

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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September 9, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Talenty w akcji: sekrety pozyskiwania i rozwoju w CIRF

Utrzymanie talentów w organizacji IT ulokowanej na konkurencyjnym rynku pracy to nie lada zadanie. A jeśli do tego mówimy o organizacji z sektora publicznego? O swoich i swojej organizacji doświadczeniach, metodach i programach opowie Anna Wituła z CIRF. Będzie to jak zawsze okazja do dyskusji na temat różnych sposobów na utrzymanie talentów w firmie.

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September 9, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Fixing the Data Foundations ; Making data trustworthy, consistent, and ready for action

As Belgium tackles GDPR and data sovereignty rules, organizations face challenges and opportunities in cross-border data management. Balancing compliance with growth raises key questions: How can companies protect and control their data while staying compliant—without blocking innovation and expansion across industries?

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September 11, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

(Nie)bezpieczny łańcuch dostaw OT: co powinien wiedzieć dział IT

W fabrykach cyberbezpieczeństwo często zależy od podwykonawców – integratorów, dostawców systemów automatyki i firm serwisowych, które mają zaskakująco szeroki dostęp do infrastruktury OT. W tej prezentacji Igor Zbyryt z BZK pokaże, jak z perspektywy końcowego użytkownika i integratora wygląda współpraca z tymi firmami oraz jakie realne ryzyka to niesie – również w kontekście NIS2. Zamiast wyliczać różnice między IT a OT, skupi się na wspólnym mianowniku i tym, co trzeba zmienić w podejściu organizacji, żeby cyber w produkcji zaczęło działać.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

How Vandebron scaled their chat support by 150% without scaling their team

Green energy provider Vandebron needed to manage a surge in volumes, while ensuring customers received the instant support they expect — all without hiring a single extra agent.

 

Vandebron at a glance

TheCustomer-Vandebron

The customer

Vandebron is a green energy company providing households across the country with solar, wind, and bio energy.

TheMarket-Vandebron

The market

Vandebron serves 200,000 energy consumers with customer support in Dutch.

TheSupportTeam-Vandebron

The support team

45 full-time employees receive an average of 5,000 chat requests per month.

TheChannels-Vandebron

The channels

Vandebron agents work across phone, email, and chat, with self-service available to logged-in customers.

TheSituation-Vandebron

The situation

Vandebron wanted to empower its customer support team to meet a surge in requests during the 2022 energy crisis.

TheSolution-Vandebron

The solution

Chat automation that fully resolves 50% of requests and proactively guides customers to self-serve and seamlessly integrates with its CRM platform: Salesforce.

 

Getting started with Ultimate

Vandebron wanted to make their CX as smooth as possible in the midst of a 2022 surge in energy prices. This included training their customers to self-serve, so they would get what they were urgently looking for faster. Vandebron found Ultimate through their CRM Salesforce's marketplace “Appexchange”, choosing it over the competition thanks to its seamless Salesforce CRM integration

Automation helped Vandebron and their customers power through the energy crisis, letting them manage 150% higher volumes without needing to scale their team or tech resources. Now, their bot is doing the work of one entire support team.

 
 
 
"Changing monthly payments, updating an address: We analyzed our data and found 70% of all customer questions could be grouped into 5-6 topics. These turned into the intents we began automating first."

Bob Molenaar
Digital Experience Manager, Vandebron

 
 
Vandebron_CaseStudy_ContentBlock_1_2x

 

AI use case spotlight: training customers to “go digital”

  • Vandebron customers’ top FAQs revolved around monthly payments, energy usage, meter readings, and changing personal information. Answers to all of them were available on the website, so Bob's team only needed to efficiently triage requests and direct users to the right place to get started.

  • Their virtual agent, or bot, identified intents based on natural language processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence. It would then handle simple requests fully, or collect information and create a case in Salesforce to reduce average handling time (AHT) for requests that ended up being escalated to a human.

  • Due to the energy crisis, monthly requests increased from 2,000 to 5,000 requests a month, but a 50% automation rate helped the team easily handle more volumes in less time.
 
Vandebron_CaseStudy_ContentBlock_2_2x

 

 

AI use case spotlight: monitoring customer satisfaction by measuring NPS

  • Vandebron has two ways of asking for customer feedback: random surveys throughout the year and regular feedback check-ins after every conversation, including post-chat.

  • Customers can give a star rating following a chat conversation. And the majority responds favorably to it: 50% give the bot 4 or 5 stars on average.

 

 

The success story

Scalable-Vandebron

Scalable

Currently, every season is busy season for Vandebron, so the fact that automation handles the work of an entire additional team is a life saver for them.

Headless-Vandebron

Headless

Vandebron chose Ultimate because it was recommended on the Salesforce marketplace, meaning they were able to integrate into Salesforce without creating silos or any interruptions to their existing tech stack.

CustomerFriendly-Vandebron

Customer-friendly

Vandebron carefully tracks their NPS and have seen that customers are taking exceptionally well to automated, 24/7 chat.

CostEffective-Vandebron

Cost-effective

A 50% automation rate is driving down Vandebron's cost per interaction, enabling Vandebron to handle more overall volumes at a lower cost.

Partners

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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Healthcare Circle

Digital Transformation is redefining the future of health care and health delivery. All stakeholders are convinced that these innovations will create value for patients, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and governments along the patient pathway. The benefits are starting from prevention and awareness to diagnosis, treatment, short- and long-term follow-up, and ultimately survival. But how do you make sure that your working towards an architecturally sound, secure and interoperable health IT ecosystem for your hospital and avoid implementing a hodgepodge of spot solutions? How does your IT department work together with the other stakeholders, such as the doctors and other healthcare practitioners, Life Sciences companies, Tech companies, regulators and your internal governance and administrative bodies?

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Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The Telenet Business Leadership Circle powered by CIONET, offers a platform where IT executives and thought leaders can meet to inspire each other and share best practices. We want to be a facilitator who helps you optimise the performance of your IT function and your business by embracing the endless opportunities that digital change brings.

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Les Rencontres

Découvrez la dynamique du leadership numérique aux Rencontres de CIONET, le programme francophone exclusif de CIONET pour les leaders numériques en Belgique, rendu possible grâce au soutien et à l'engagement de nos partenaires de programme : Deloitte, Denodo et Red Hat. Rejoignez trois événements inspirants par an à Liège, Namur et en Brabant Wallon, où des CIOs et des experts numériques francophones de premier plan partagent leurs perspectives et expériences sur des thèmes d'affaires et de IT actuels. Laissez-vous inspirer et apprenez des meilleurs du secteur lors de sessions captivantes conçues spécialement pour soutenir et enrichir votre rôle en tant que CIO pair. Ne manquez pas cette opportunité de faire partie d'un réseau exceptionnel d'innovateurs numériques !

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Female Leadership Circle

CIONET is committed to highlighting and celebrating female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, creating a leadership programme that empowers and elevates women within the tech industry. This initiative is dedicated to showcasing the achievements and successes of leading women, fostering an environment where female role models are recognised, and their contributions can ignite progress and inspire the next generation of women in IT. Our mission is to shine the spotlight a little brighter on female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, and to empower each other through this inner network community.

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Check out our latest news

Testimonials

Geert Goethals
Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
Bridgestone EMIA
Untitled design (1)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-57-AM
Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
Untitled design-Nov-22-2023-08-42-05-3178-AM
Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
Piet_De_Ceuleners
Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
1658251930890
Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
Untitled design-7
Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Geert Lejon
Geert Lejon
Vice President Head of Belux / Head of Comms Benelux
Cognizant
Kevin_Ledegen
Kevin Ledegen
Group IT director
SDWorx
Gunter-Van-Craen_Small
Gunter Van Craen
Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
Deloitte
Emmanuel Gob
Emmanuel Gob
CIO
DPD
pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
CIO
Colruyt
Untitled design (4)-Dec-13-2023-10-53-15-5032-AM
Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
Dell Technologies
benoit dewaele
Benoît Dewaele
Group IT Directo
Vandemoortele
Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
CTO - Technology Services & Practices
SMALS
Thierry Driesens
Thierry Driesens
CIO
TVH
Untitled design-Sep-18-2023-11-59-29-7866-AM
Koen Vandaele
CIO
Delen Private Bank
Untitled design (4)-Jun-12-2023-01-23-11-7540-PM
Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
steven-vermeulen
Steven Vermeulen
CIO
Digitaal Vlaanderen
Jack Hamande
Jack Hamande
Director General Digital Transformation
Federale Overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning
Tom Tomczak
Tom Tomczak
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
1726588748718
Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
National Bank of Belgium
Untitled design (2)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-68-AM
Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Koen Van Loo
Koen Van Loo
CIO
Group S.
Peter Sany
Peter Sany
Executive Advisor
Zoom
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Steven De Haes
Steven De Haes
Dean
Antwerp Management School
Marleen Thorré
Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
Mitsubishi Chemical Group
christel-plessers
Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe
bauduin cor
Baudouin Corlùy
Chief Market Development Officer
LCL Data Centers

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
CEO
Inès De Bien
Inès De Bien
Partner - CCO
1-Feb-08-2022-10-22-08-68-AM
Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
Hendrik Deckers
Founder - MD
Untitled design (1)-2
Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Program Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
Untitled design (5)-Sep-01-2022-02-47-55-60-PM
Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
Untitled design (1)-Nov-22-2023-08-56-42-6802-AM
Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme & Event Manager

Contact us

Would you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!