5 Ways MongoDB Puts Customer Experience First

Richard Livingston
November 2, 2022

Here at MongoDB, we obsess over customer experience. Dedication to the customer experience is part of our culture and the way we do business at MongoDB.

Even if you haven’t heard the term customer experience (or CX) before, you probably have an intuitive sense of what it means. CX is the sum of all the interactions someone has with a company and can encompass anything from navigating a website, to dealing with customer service, to learning how to use a product.

MongoDB is not alone in thinking the customer experience is a big deal. Consumer sentiment (both B2B and B2C) indicates that companies who do not mold their practices around their customers’ desires do so at their peril. For example:

  • 74% of customers are likely to buy a product based on favorable CX

  • 66% of customers want companies to understand and address their needs

  • And, a whopping 96% of customers say that CX is crucial for loyalty to a business

At MongoDB, across the organization and at all levels, there is an expectation to do everything we can to understand our customers’ technical and business goals and to help our users achieve those objectives.

Here are five key ways MongoDB makes sure that customer needs come first:

  1. Dedicated customer success function
    MongoDB’s hundreds-strong Customer Success team is tasked with making sure you get the most from your investment in our products. Access to Customer Success is free of charge and part of the purchase when you sign on with MongoDB. Think of Customer Success as an extension of your own team. We’re equally invested in the impact MongoDB has on your development cycles and business outcomes, which means our partnership does not end when you purchase from us. Rather, we see your investment with us as the beginning of a trusted partnership. You’re on a journey with MongoDB, and we’re here to guide and support you throughout.

  2. Goal-focused onboarding
    When you do business with MongoDB, the first part of your journey will be the onboarding process. We consider onboarding to be the most critical phase. Onboarding is our opportunity to set you up for long-term success with your MongoDB products, right from the very beginning. Certainly, we want you to get tangible value from our products, but we also want to connect with a shared purpose. Although we understand that every deployment is unique, we find that a clear onboarding workflow – from planning to launch – can help you swiftly and successfully get your applications live.

  3. In-depth success planning
    Before your developers get to work, it’s crucial to define what you want to build with our products and to determine the best way to get there. We will take the time to understand your desired business and technical outcomes, as well as how you measure success. When you sign on with MongoDB, our team will work closely with yours to develop a formal success plan. Through shared accountability and ownership of the process, our teams will use that plan as a roadmap as you build, launch, run — and ultimately optimize — your apps.

  4. Open office hours
    To maintain open communication with our MongoDB community, our Customer Success team hosts regularly scheduled Office Hour sessions. Whether you’re going live for the first time, expanding your current MongoDB platform, or just considering MongoDB, these open meetings will help you learn more about available MongoDB resources and give you the opportunity to talk directly with our Customer Success experts. Register now for MongoDB Customer Success office hours.

  5. Information at your fingertips
    MongoDB also makes it easy to get the information you need through our online Success Center, where you can access guides, samples, references, and resources for building applications on the MongoDB developer data platform.

    Here are other ways to connect with MongoDB:

These elements of customer experience do not capture the full scope of how MongoDB helps our customers achieve tangible value from our solutions. But, they provide noteworthy examples of how MongoDB is doubling down on your experience.

Our Customer Success team is excited to work with you, offering the tools and knowledge to help you build the next big thing for your organization.

Learn more about Customer Success at MongoDB.

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How a MongoDB Internship Helped Sahi Muthyala Grow Her Skills

Sahi Muthyala Sahi Muthyala is a rising senior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who is working as a Product Management intern at MongoDB’s New York City office. Sahi is currently interning with the Atlas Growth team, where she is not only helping the Product Management department but also learning about product research, product culture, and connection. In this interview, you’ll read about the learning experience and culture at MongoDB that has made this program the perfect internship for Sahi. Sezzy Rodriguez: Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Sahi. The first thing I’m curious about is how did you hear about MongoDB's internship? Sahi Muthyala: I first heard about MongoDB's internship through one of my college mentors during my freshman year at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She had just interned on the Node Driver team and had a lot of great things to say about the program. The amount of ownership, collaboration, and mentorship that she got during the course of her internship, and the way she spoke of MongoDB's culture really stood out to me. SR: That was such a great connection. Why, besides what you heard from your mentor, did you decide to intern at MongoDB? SM: I decided to intern at MongoDB for a few reasons: First, the impact that MongoDB has excites me. The beauty of our end users being developers is that our technology supports them in building applications that can impact billions of people. There is no limit to the impact that MongoDB can have, and that gets me really pumped about the problems that I'm going to be working on. Second, staying technical was top-of-mind, and I knew that I would definitely be able to do that at MongoDB, regardless of the team that I was going to be on because of how our end users are developers and how technical our products are. Third, I wanted to work at a mid-sized company, because I wanted to learn from what MongoDB does well but also have the room to contribute outside the scope of my projects/role and move quickly without too much process. SR: I’m so glad you noticed all of these things even before interning. Speaking of, tell me about the team you are interning on. SM: I am interning on the Atlas Growth team, which was formed in 2018 to focus on growing the self-serve usage of Atlas by helping users become successful to reach their full potential on Atlas. The team is very cross-functional in that product, design, research, marketing, analytics, and engineering are all working together to brainstorm the experiments that we can run and how to iterate based on results. We also work with other teams like Atlas Search and App Services (formerly Realm), which is exciting. The Atlas Growth team is currently split into three squads — Activation & Engagement, Monetization, and Product-led Acquisition. I am working on Activation & Engagement this summer to reduce the time for new users to experience value in the product and increase their engagement with the platform. My favorite parts of the team are how quantitative and qualitative we are, and how we think about the big picture. We do lots of A/B testing and iterating and are very data-driven, but also talk to customers to understand their needs and broader user/development journey. In terms of big-picture thinking, our team is thinking about how we can improve an existing product that has a lot of cross-over with other products and subproducts, so we have to zoom out and think more long-term. Even if we are running smaller A/B tests, they are often tied to validating a certain larger vision or figuring out how we should go about doing something. There is also no such thing as a failed experiment because we gain insight from every experiment that we run, which helps us inform future decisions. SR: What a great team to have. What is your favorite project you have worked on so far? SM: Definitely product research on local development. Initially, I was focused on product research for Atlas CLI, which we announced at MongoDB World, but the scope of the project expanded to local development. The focus of my user interviews leaned toward understanding users' app building and local development journey so we could understand how Atlas CLI can fit into that journey, and when and where we can surface it to users. Learning more about what different users are trying to accomplish and how they leverage our different tools was really insightful. Other major parts of this research project included a competitive analysis, user survey, and data analysis, which I used to gather findings, identify parallels, and come up with experiments that we can run. SR: That’s so interesting. What is the culture like at MongoDB? SM: The culture at MongoDB is incredible. People not only care deeply about what they are working on, but also want to know all about what you are working on and how they can support you. I care a lot about being somewhere where people are passionate about what we are building, and I see that at MongoDB. Furthermore, I love the product culture at MongoDB. We are user-obsessed. Developers will not start using our products just because of all of the cool things we say about what we have to offer. They care about whether our products and tools address their needs. It is pretty simple, but looking deeper, developers are challenging users: Not all developers are the same, and they tend to have pretty different use cases and even use different combinations of our products. These differences really push us to think about the whole developer journey and work cross-team to make sure that our users truly have the best experience. SR: What is your favorite part about interning at MongoDB? SM: The people. I am so glad that I have been around such incredible people who really care about what we do and who make sure that I am well-supported and have a fruitful experience. This internship has enabled me to learn so much from them and grow in ways that I did not even foresee before my internship started — from energy management to how to frame meetings/presentations with different audiences, and so much more. I am glad that I have found such a great fit in my final college internship. I feel like I have already grown so much as a young professional and have a strong idea of what I want to focus on next in my full-time role. SR: I’m so happy you’ve had a great internship experience at MongoDB. How has your team/mentors helped you as an intern this summer? SM: My mentor Richa has made me feel incredibly connected, valued, and supported as an intern. Even with her busy schedule, she made the time to meet with me for at least 30 minutes every day for the first few weeks of the internship to answer the many questions that I had, and she always encouraged me to explore whatever sparked my interest. Even though I have only been here for a few weeks, I have been pleasantly surprised to see how seriously my feedback is taken, whether it is around a product or process. The Atlas Growth team has made me feel just like another member of the team, and some PMs on other teams have taken it upon themselves to make me feel included and help me as much as they can. SR: Anything else you'd like to share? SM: Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions about my experience. You can also follow me on Medium , where I write about product management among other topics.

November 1, 2022
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MongoDB Database Observability: Integrating with Monitoring Tools

This post is the final in a three-part series on leveraging database observability. Welcome back to our series on Leveraging Database Observability! Our previous post showcased a real-world use case highlighting how MongoDB Atlas’s observability tools effectively tackle database performance challenges. Whether you’re a developer, DBA, or DevOps engineer, our mission is to empower you to harness the full potential of your data through our observability suite . Integrating Atlas metrics with your central enterprise observability tools can simplify your operations. By seamlessly working with popular observability tools, our approach helps teams streamline workflows and enhance visibility across systems. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with third-party monitoring tools MongoDB’s developer data platform combines all essential data services for building modern applications within a unified experience. Our purpose-built observability tools for Atlas environments offer automatic monitoring and optimization, guiding diagnostics tailored specifically for MongoDB. Additionally, we extend Atlas metrics into your existing enterprise observability stack, enabling seamless integration without replacing your current tools. This creates a consolidated, single-pane view that unifies Atlas telemetry with other tech and application metrics, ensuring comprehensive visibility into both database and full-stack performance. This integration empowers you to monitor, receive alerts, and make data-driven decisions within your existing workflows, driving greater efficiency. Below is a quick guide to modifying integration settings through the Atlas UI and the popular integrations we support: Navigate to the Project Integrations page in Atlas. Choose the organization and project you want to configure from the navigation bar. On the Project Integrations page, select the third-party services you’d like to integrate. Configure the chosen services with the required API keys and regions. Critical integrations for your observability platform With Atlas’s Datadog and Prometheus integrations, you can send critical MongoDB metrics to these platforms, empowering detailed, real-time monitoring. Through Datadog , you can track database operation counts, query efficiency, and resource usage, ideal for pinpointing bottlenecks and managing resources. Similarly, Prometheus enables you to monitor essential metrics like query times, connection rates, and memory usage, supporting flexible tracking of database health and performance. Both integrations facilitate proactive detection of issues, alert configuration for resource thresholds, and a cohesive view of Atlas data when visualized in Grafana. Atlas’s integration with PagerDuty streamlines incident management by sending metrics like performance alerts, billing anomalies, and security events directly to PagerDuty. This integration records incidents automatically, notifies teams upon alerts, and supports two-way syncing, ensuring resolved alerts in Atlas are reflected in PagerDuty. It enables efficient incident response and resource allocation to maintain system stability. With Atlas integrations for Microsoft Teams and Slack, you can route key metrics—such as query latency, disk usage, and throughput—to these channels for timely updates. Teams can use these insights for real-time performance monitoring, incident response, and collaboration. Notifications through these platforms ensure your team stays informed on database performance, storage health, and user activity changes as they occur. Use case: Centralized observability with MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack Let’s walk through a hypothetical scenario for ShopSmart, an e-commerce company that leverages MongoDB Atlas to manage its product catalog and customer data. As traffic surges, the DevOps team faces challenges in monitoring application performance and database health effectively. To tackle these challenges, the team leverages MongoDB Atlas’ integration with Datadog and Slack, creating a powerful observability ecosystem. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with Datadog: The team pushes key MongoDB Atlas metrics into Datadog, such as query performance, connection counts, and Atlas Vector Search metrics. With Datadog, they can visualize these metrics and correlate overall MongoDB performance with their other applications. Out-of-the-box monitors and dedicated dashboards allow the team to track metrics like throughput, average read/write latency, and current connections. This visibility helps pinpoint bottlenecks in real time, ensuring optimal database performance and improving overall application responsiveness. Setting up alerts in Datadog: The team configures alerts for critical metrics like high query latency and increased error rates. When thresholds are breached, Datadog instantly notifies the team. This proactive approach allows the team to address potential performance issues before they impact customers. Integrating Datadog with Slack: To ensure fast communication, alerts are sent directly to the dedicated Slack channel, “ShopSmart-Alerts.” This integration fosters seamless collaboration, enabling the team to discuss and resolve issues in real-time. With these integrations, ShopSmart’s engineering team can monitor performance quickly and address issues efficiently. The unified observability approach enhances operational efficiency, improves the customer experience, and supports ShopSmart’s competitive edge in the e-commerce industry. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack, the team ensures scalable performance and drives continuous innovation. Conclusion MongoDB Atlas empowers developers and organizations to achieve unparalleled observability and control over their database environments. By seamlessly integrating with central enterprise observability tools, Atlas enhances your ability to monitor performance metrics and ensures you can do so within your existing workflows. This means you can focus on building modern applications confidently, knowing you have the insights and alerts necessary to maintain optimal performance. Embrace the power of MongoDB Atlas and transform your approach to database management—because your applications can thrive when your data is observable. And that wraps up our Leveraging Database Observability series! We hope you learned something new and found value in these discussions. Sign up for MongoDB Atlas , our cloud database service, to see database observability in action. To dive deeper and expand your knowledge, check out this learning byte for more insights on the MongoDB observability suite and how it can enhance your database performance.

November 14, 2024