Use case

Turn an escalation into a traceable product investigation.

Coby helps product teams connect a customer report to usage, support, account, and product evidence. Investigate what happened, which accounts are affected, what revenue is exposed, and who should own the next step—with uncertainty left visible.

Last reviewed 2026-09-07

The output contract

A useful diagnostic should separate facts, inferences, and missing evidence. It should never hide a partial read behind a confident paragraph.

The investigation should answer	What the result must contain
Who is reporting the problem?	The resolved person, account, segment, plan, and relevant lifecycle context—with the identifiers used to make the match.
What actually happened?	The customer report alongside behavioral, error, product, and delivery evidence, each linked to its source and time.
Is this isolated?	Affected users or accounts, relevant cohorts, the evidence coverage denominator, and explicit exclusions.
What is the likely cause?	A distinction between symptom, contributing factors, and root-cause candidates, with confidence and contradictory evidence.
Who should own the next step?	The relevant product area, team, open work, incident, or decision history—plus unresolved ownership when the data does not support a match.
What happens next?	A proposed action, the person who must decide, and the evidence that would confirm or falsify the diagnosis.

A repeatable investigation workflow

Resolve the signal
Match the person, account, product area, and time window across the connected systems. Record uncertainty instead of forcing a weak identity match.
Build the evidence set
Collect the relevant support, behavior, error, billing, roadmap, and decision evidence. Report N examined out of N available whenever the source permits it.
Separate symptom from cause
Test whether the complaint aligns with observed behavior, known incidents, recent releases, configuration, or a broader adoption problem.
Scope the impact
Find similar users and accounts, then bring in account value or lifecycle only when the corresponding source and identity match are available.
Connect ownership and history
Link the product area, team, existing issue, prior decision, and any earlier attempt to solve the same pattern.
Hand a human a decision-ready result
Present the evidence, remaining uncertainty, recommendation, proposed owner, and the next check. The product owner decides and corrects the record when needed.

Illustrative example

This is a workflow example, not a customer claim. Imagine a strategic account reports that scheduled exports intermittently fail.

Signal

The support conversation identifies the reporter, account, timestamps, export type, and the customer's observed symptom.

Behavior and reliability

Usage and error sources show which export attempts failed, whether the pattern followed a release, and whether comparable accounts saw it.

Product context

Roadmap and code history identify the responsible area, related incidents or issues, and any earlier tradeoff that shaped the current behavior.

Decision-ready result

The PM receives affected scope, evidence links, likely causes, contradictions, an owner candidate, and a test that would confirm the diagnosis.

How to calculate the ARR exposed by a product bug

Count affected accounts, not messages or users. Join each account to the current recurring-revenue source, keep the time window and currency consistent, and add each account only once.

Hypothetical worked example, not customer data or a Coby performance claim. Over a seven-day window, 12 failed export attempts and seven support messages resolve to three paying accounts. All three billing matches are verified. The amounts below are current monthly recurring revenue in EUR; there are no usage-based charges in this example.

Unique affected account	Failed exports	Support messages	Verified MRR
Account A	6	4	€1,000
Account B	4	2	€2,000
Account C	2	1	€500

Exposed ARR = (€1,000 + €2,000 + €500) × 12 = €42,000 across three accounts.

What this tells the PM

The issue touches three accounts with €42,000 in annualized recurring revenue. Repeated reports from Account A increase recurrence evidence; they do not multiply its revenue.

What it does not establish

€42,000 is neither predicted churn nor money saved by a fix. Renewal intent, competing explanations, contract terms, and the actual customer response still need investigation.

What an incomplete join changes

If an account cannot be matched, report it separately. A verified subtotal is not the total impact. Likewise, a failed support query does not mean there were no complaints.

A reviewable result links every affected account to the failure evidence, source timestamp, billing match, and owner candidate. Check customer severity alongside revenue: a critical failure for a smaller account can deserve priority over a minor inconvenience for a larger one.

Why a generic connected agent can still fail

Giving an AI access to several tools solves access. It does not automatically solve identity, completeness, time, or shared definitions.

The same entity has different IDs

A support contact, product user, CRM account, and billing customer may not join without maintained identity resolution.

Retrieval is not exhaustive

Semantic search often returns relevant examples, not the complete set. Without a denominator, a persuasive answer can still be incomplete.

Old facts remain plausible

A superseded owner, plan, or decision can look current unless facts carry time and invalidation.

Every session starts again

One-off connectors do not necessarily preserve the corrected identity, definition, prior decision, and later outcome for the next investigation.

How to run a credible pilot

The evaluation set is the specification. Define it before looking at Coby's output.

Stage	Method	What to measure
Historical set	Select at least 30 representative escalations with known outcomes, including ambiguous and failed investigations.	Identity accuracy, evidence coverage, factual accuracy, root-cause usefulness, and time to a reviewable result.
Baseline	Run the current human workflow and the best practical DIY agent or connector workflow on the same cases.	Incremental lift, not performance against a deliberately weak baseline.
Blind review	Have domain owners judge results without knowing which system produced them.	Acceptance, corrections required, dangerous omissions, and whether the proposed next step was usable.
Live test	Run new cases with human approval before any operational action.	Time saved, repeated corrections, adoption by the actual owner, and whether the result changed a decision.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate the ARR exposed by a product bug?

Identify unique affected customer accounts in a defined time window, verify each match to the billing or CRM source, and sum recurring revenue once per account using a consistent currency and definition. Exclude unmatched accounts from the monetary total and report them as a gap. Exposed ARR is not a forecast of churn or revenue that will be lost.

What counts as a customer escalation?

Any signal that requires a product team to determine what happened, who is affected, how serious it is, and who should respond. It may start in support, sales, customer success, Slack, an incident channel, or a product review.

Does Coby automatically decide the response?

No. Coby assembles and scopes the evidence, makes uncertainty visible, and can propose ownership or next steps. A responsible product owner verifies the diagnosis and decides what to do.

Can this work without every source connected?

Yes, but the answer must state what was and was not examined. A useful result exposes its denominator and gaps instead of presenting partial evidence as exhaustive.

How should we evaluate a pilot?

Use representative historical cases with known outcomes, pre-register the expected evidence and quality bar, compare against your current workflow and a DIY agent baseline, then test live cases with human review.

Bring one difficult product question.

We will show which sources Coby used, how much evidence it covered, what it could not establish, and where a human still needs to decide.

Test a question with Coby