Building a Client Database With Polcode Increases Customer Satisfaction

About Muse

There are a sea of tech options that promise to improve cognitive health and well-being, but the teams at Muse stand out by offering a more fun and functional way to meditate, focus, and recover overnight. The Muse® headbands by Interaxon are EEG-powered devices that provide real-time biofeedback used in brainwave-controlled computing technology and applications.

As the Muse products continue to take over in market share – selling more portable EEG devices than any other system in history and facilitating millions of minutes meditated across the globe – their customer care teams needed a bespoke platform to gain insights into individual customers at a granular level. “As a consumer electronics brand, a lot of what we do is centered around customer experience. Our service agents want to know how to help users achieve their goals, or find their solutions in the best possible way,” says Marcela Guerra, Software Engineering Director at Muse by Interaxon.

Growing Muse Customer Care

Polcode’s Remote Team Extension originally worked with Muse building their Content Management System (CMS) for the Meditation Studio App, which curates a collection of meditation techniques that uses recordings to explain and instruct students on different meditation styles.

After proving successful, the Polcode team moved on to focus on improving customer care by developing a Data Warehouse System created from scratch. Because there were copious amounts of historical customer data, a custom solution (rather than pre-packaged CRM) turned out to be the ideal solution.

Customer care agents must quickly understand their clients’ history, needs and goals – a potentially overwhelming task, considering that service teams receive more tickets than ever, coming in from various channels.

To meet this volume, Muse enlisted the help of Polcode’s distributed teams of Ruby on Rails specialists, who provide remote team augmentation, including project management, account management, and development talent. The customer care tool needed to be affordable to build, easy to implement.

The Muser Project: A Single View of the Customer

The Muser Project - a Data Warehouse collecting information from all internal systems of Interaxon - was the culmination of our joint efforts to centralize the most important customer patterns into a single view.

With the new customer care interface, agents can search for a specific customer, sort by different parameters, and investigate customer profiles that go back to the earliest data points recorded. Condensed knowledge of purchasing decisions, meditation sessions, types of devices, and integrated applications can all be found in a single source.

One of the core challenges was implementing a massive amount of historical data into the new application, so that it could align with newer data sets. On the backend side, our teams were responsible for database migrations, using a mixture of PostgreSQL, Bootstrap 4 and Google Cloud Storage for ActiveStorage backend to ensure that the platform captured all historical customer data in the newly developed interface.

On the product side of the Muser project, we developed both Customer profiles and Muser profiles, which offered a hierarchical structure that allowed for flexibility in managing user accounts, depending on whether or not there were multiple users (e.g. a household), as opposed to individual accounts (e.g. sessions purchased, individual device settings).

Muser now provides a single source of omnichannel agent experience, capturing every aspect of the customer contact. Many bespoke features were developed to accomplish this granular approach to customer care, some of which included:

Muse Sessions
Historical list of single session meditations with all possible metadata collected and logged in user-friendly list. It outlines how the session was going, broken down into; body, breath, mind, emotion. Depending on the type of meditation selected, the device registers different parameters.
Reports
Agents and managers can download business-centric statistics, giving aggregated insights to show how users are liking meditation sessions, how long they perform certain sessions, and the overall number and minutes that active meditation occurs.
Listing Muse Devices
Several types of devices are available due to the evolution and iteration of the Muse product lines. The system receives important metrics about which devices the user has connected, including the levels of support offered for historical devices. It also shows which types of 3rd party services are integrated with a particular user’s Muse app.
Managing Profiles
A single user can have several Muser profiles. Each one can have different access for example to exclusive sessions. This portion of the customer care tool allows agents to assist when a customer needs
Investigating User Apps
The application downloaded on the phone connects to the active user's device (e.g. headband) and gives access to a list of meditation sessions.

Hear from our client:

We've been working with Polcode teams for well over a year now. Their developers are extremely experienced and have great communication skills, and to top it all off, they feel like they’re part of our team.

Marcela Guerra

Software Engineering Director at Muse by Interaxon

The Outcome: Customer-Centric Focus

Not every client experience is perfect. But how a company responds and takes care of their customers makes all the difference. With the new platform, Muse agents can easily investigate and offer solutions on almost every single ticket that comes their way. With the centralized reporting features, stakeholders can also get a fully transparent view of the customer experience, which goes a long way towards building a positive reputation with end users.

The system had a positive impact on client experience, with usage by agents going up, and feedback from clients indicating that many of the issues faced involved solutions from the new system.
Migrating historical data eliminates legacy issues that would otherwise render future backend projects as costly. Instead, Muse is now able to continue building out the customer care platform, with new projects already underway using the updated database framework.
Fast development timeframes unlocked operational efficiencies that would have been slowed down by trying to adapt an out-of-the-box CRM solution to their custom needs.
Better agency efficiency was gained so that time-consuming investigation into customer tickets involves only one source of interaction.
Improved reporting and business KPI metrics as a result of connecting all data points into a single interface.