What BackEngine is
BackEngine is the customer context layer for Claude. It connects every system that touches your customer — CRM, email, calls, support, Slack — joins the data across them, scopes access to each user's existing permissions, and exposes one structured view that Claude can use to do real work.
Without a context layer, Claude connected directly to your tools hits a wall. Token limits force it to sample. Permissions are inconsistent across systems. Joins between accounts, calls, and emails have to be reconstructed for every question. The result is confident answers that are quietly wrong.
BackEngine solves that. One slash command — /backengine — gives Claude direct access to your accounts, conversations, signals, tickets, and the rest. Joined. Ranked. Permissioned to the asking user.
What you can do with it
Prep for any customer interaction with full conversational history pulled from across your stack
Surface hidden churn and expansion signals that live in calls and emails but not in your CRM health score
Audit your forecast against what’s actually happening in deal conversations
Synthesize feature requests across hundreds of customer conversations, weighted by ARR
Build live Claude artifacts that update continuously as new customer signals come in
Schedule recurring reports — Monday customer TLDRs, daily call briefs, Friday forecast slippage scans
All inside Claude. No new UI to learn. One slash command.
Setup
1Provision your BackEngine workspace
Visit backengine.ai or contact sales@backengine.ai. A BackEngine deployment includes:
- Workspace setup with your team's users
- Source system connections (CRM, calls, email, support, Slack)
- Business rules and groups configured for your business
- A 30-day install engagement to ship workflows and train your team
If you're an existing customer, your workspace is already provisioned — skip to step 2.
2Connect your source systems
Inside BackEngine, connect the systems your team works in. Each connection is OAuth-based and read-only by default. Supported today:
Permissions are mapped to each user's existing access in the source system. If a user can't see an account in Salesforce, Claude can't see it through BackEngine either.
3Install /backengine in Claude
In Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, or Claude Mobile:
- Open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector
- Enter the BackEngine MCP URL:
- Click Connect and complete the OAuth flow with your BackEngine credentials
- In any chat, type
/backenginefollowed by your prompt
That's it. Claude now has structured access to your customer context.
Authentication
BackEngine uses OAuth 2.1 with PKCE (S256 challenge method). The first time you connect, Claude redirects you to BackEngine for authentication, and BackEngine returns an access token scoped to your user's permissions across every connected source system.
You can review and revoke active connections at app.backengine.ai → Settings → Connected Apps at any time.
Using /backengine in Claude
/backengine is a directive — it tells Claude to invoke the BackEngine MCP for any data lookup, join, or search related to your customers. You don't need to know which underlying tool to call. Claude routes to the right one based on the question.
Example 1 — Pre-call briefing
- Reads your calendar to find the meeting and attendees
- Calls
get_account_overviewfor Acme Corp - Calls
list_signalsandlist_sourcesscoped to Acme, last 30 days - Calls
list_ticketsfor any open issues - Synthesizes a structured brief: attendees, recent activity, open commitments, sentiment trajectory, recommended agenda
Typical response time: 8–12 seconds.
Example 2 — Renewal risk surfacing
- Calls
get_groupfor the renewal cohort (e.g., "Q3 Renewals") - For each account, calls
get_account_overviewandlist_signalsfiltered to negative sentiment, unfulfilled commitments, and champion silence - Compares against the CRM-reported health score
- Returns accounts where the conversation signal is meaningfully worse than the score suggests, with source quotes for each
Example 3 — Feature request synthesis
- Calls
find_similar_signalswith semantic query "feature request" filtered to the current quarter - Groups by request theme
- Weights each by the requesting account's ARR
- Surfaces the top 10 with the customer quotes that drove each ranking
More example prompts
Available tools
The BackEngine MCP exposes 30 read-only tools and one generation tool (create_presentation). Claude routes to the right tool based on your question — you generally don't need to invoke them by name.
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| Accounts & prospects | list_accounts, get_account, get_account_overview, list_prospects, get_prospect, get_activity |
| Groups | list_groups, get_group |
| Signals | list_signals, get_signal, find_similar_signals, list_signal_speakers |
| Sources (calls, emails) | list_sources, get_source, find_similar_sources |
| Tickets | list_tickets, get_ticket, find_similar_tickets |
| Contacts | list_contacts, get_contact |
| Library | list_contexts, get_context, list_templates, get_template |
| Metadata | list_roles, list_services, list_reports, list_subscriptions |
| Calendar & chats | get_calendar_events, find_similar_chats |
| Generation | create_presentation |
Permissions and security
Full security overview: Trust Center
Troubleshooting
"Tool not available" or empty response
Confirm the user is authenticated in BackEngine and has access to the queried account in the source system. The MCP respects source-system permissions strictly.
Slow response on large queries
Queries that span the entire book (e.g., "every signal across every customer") run faster when scoped to a group. Use a static group or a CRM-synced dynamic group to narrow the set.
Outdated data
Source-system data refreshes on a schedule per integration; most refresh hourly. To force a refresh, contact your BackEngine admin or support@backengine.ai.
Auth errors after an idle period
OAuth tokens may expire. Disconnect and reconnect the connector in Claude → Settings → Connectors.
Support
Ready to give Claude your customer context?
A 30-minute working session. We'll look at your stack and show you what /backengine looks like with your data.
