Boosting Customer Lifetime Value with Agmeta and MongoDB

Nobody likes calling customer service. The phone trees, the wait times, the janky music, and how often your issue just isn’t resolved can make the whole process one most people would rather avoid.

For business owners, the customer contact center can also be a source of frustration, simultaneously creating customer churn and unhappiness, while also acting as a black hole of information as to why that churn occurred.

It doesn’t have to be this way. What if instead, customer service centers offered valuable ways to increase the Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) of customers, pipelines of upsell opportunities, and valuable sources of information?

That’s the goal of Agmeta.AI, a startup dedicated to giving businesses actionable insights to fight churn, identify key customers primed for upsell, and improve customer service overall.

Lost in translation

“We started with a very simple thesis±people call into contact centers because they have a problem. That is a real make-or-break moment. The opportunity for churn is very high… or that customer can be a great target for upselling,” said Samir Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Agmeta.

“All of this data sits in a contact center, and businesses don't ever get to see it,” he added.

According to Samir, even the businesses that think they are collecting useful information on customer service interactions are instead collecting incorrect or incomplete information. Or worse, they’re analyzing the information they do record incorrectly.

Every business today talks about the importance of customer experience (CX), but the challenge businesses face is how they quantify that CX. Many contact centers substitute call sentiment for CX, or use keywords to determine canned responses.

For example, imagine if a customer calls into a service center and they have what appears to be a positive conversation with an agent. They use words and phrases like “thank you,” and “yes, I understand,” and reply “no, I do not have anything else to ask” at the end of a call in which their complaint is not resolved. After putting the phone down, the customer goes on to cancel the service, or worse, initiate a chargeback request with their credit card provider.

In some businesses the customer service agent may manually mark such a call as positive’ The agent, after all, ‘answered all the customers' concerns.’ As this example illustrates, the sentiment of a call should not be confused with the measure of customer experience.

Another common way businesses try to gather feedback is by sending a post-call survey. However, a problem with this approach is that industry response rates for surveys are close to 3%. This implies that decisions get made on that small sample, and may not take into account the other 97% of the customers who didn’t respond to the survey. Survey results are also frequently skewed, as those most likely to respond are also the ones who were most unhappy with the contact center interaction and want their voices heard.

The MongoDB advantage

Using machine learning and generative AI, backed by MongoDB Atlas, Agmeta’s software understands not only the content of the call, but the context too. Taking our example above, Agmeta’s software would detect that the customer is unhappy, despite their polite and ‘positive’ sounding conversation with the agent, and flag the customer as a potential churn or chargeback candidate in need of immediate attention.

“We will give you a CSAT (customer satisfaction) score and a reason for that CSAT score within seconds of the call ending±for 100% of the interactions,” said Samir.

For Agmeta to work, Samir and his team had to have a database ready to accept all kinds of data, including voice recordings, unstructured text, and constantly evolving schema.

“We didn’t have a fixed schema, we needed a database that was as flexible as Agmeta needed to be. I’ve known of MongoDB forever, so when I started to look at databases it seemed an obvious choice to me,” he said.

The ability to quickly and easily work with vectorized data for gen AI was also crucial.

“MongoDB provides vector search capabilities in an operational database. Rather than having to add a bolt on a vector database and figure out the ETL, MongoDB solved this issue for me in a single product. The way I look at it, if you do a good job on Vector search, then my life as an entrepreneur and software builder becomes much easier,” Samir said.

After assessing database options and multiple LLMs, Samir and his team chose to pair MongoDB Atlas with Google Cloud, taking advantage of Gemini on Google’s generative AI platform.

“With Atlas on Google Cloud, there are zero worries about database administration, maintenance, and availability. This frees us up to focus on creating business value,” Samir said. “Another benefit of using MongoDB is the flexibility to use the customer’s MongoDB setup which gives the customer the peace of mind from the perspective of security and privacy of their data.”

Customer service first

With the power of generative AI and MongoDB, Agmeta can deliver a CSAT score that measures the customers’ true takeaway from the call. The CSAT score is a multi-dimensional score that takes into account areas including resolution (as the customer sees it), politeness, the onus on the customer, and many other attributes.

In the short term, the primary use for this technology is to detect and flag those customers at risk of churn, filing a charge dispute with their card provider, or potentially upselling, giving businesses an opportunity to “see” what they could never find out before.

“When we talk to customers, the number one thing they are concerned about is customer churn. Right now they operate completely blind with no idea why people are leaving them,” said Samir. “One large telecoms customer Agmeta is in talks with had no idea where their churn was happening. But when we described being able to assign every customer a CSAT score, they were very excited,” he added.

And it’s not just about preventing churn. Businesses can identify happy customers too, targeting them for upsell opportunities.

“One of the things we do is spot patterns of unanswered questions from product support interactions,” Samir added. “When we see ‘Oh look, suddenly there are a lot more calls because of a release,’ then we can flag this to product teams as a must-fix issue.”

The future of customer service

Agmeta aims to amalgamate customer information with current and past experiences to provide businesses a more holistic±and nuanced—picture of their customers, and more precise next steps they can take.

“What we want to do is look back in time and see what else happened with this customer,” Samir said. “The goal is to provide businesses with targeted directives to minimize churn and grow customer lifetime value.”

Retrieval-augmented generation plays a key role in Agmeta’s vision. This also means an expanded role for both MongoDB’s vector database as the source of information against which semantic searches can be run, as well as Gemini for both analysis and presentation of the directives for the business.