Every customer-centric business leader is aware that a loyal and satisfied customer can drive business growth. This is the number one requirement to scale. Sometimes, it is a battle between an SME versus a leader with a long legacy. So how can you navigate your way among other hyper successful startups? How can you stay at par with other strong market contenders?
We’ve got you covered. In this blog, we will discuss why a customer experience dashboard is important and the types of CX dashboards. We will also discuss the step by step method on building your own customer experience dashboard from scratch.
What is a Customer Experience Dashboard?
A customer experience dashboard is a visual display of every critical customer information with a bird’s eye view. It is like the control center for understanding your customers. It is a dashboard where all the action happens – tracking how your customers interact with your business. All data collected over this dashboard can be presented in a digestible format of graphs, charts and comprehensive reports.
The dashboard can track metrics of:
- The number of clicks on your website across platforms.
- A user’s latest social media mention about your service/product.
- A user’s satisfaction metrics across the user journey.
- Testimonials and reviews across Google or other third party review websites.
- Identify customer complaints, ticket status or resolution status.
- Omnichannel customer to brand interaction points.
Why is a Customer Experience Dashboard important?
A great CX dashboard is more than just numbers. It offers an in-depth view of the customer journey. This helps businesses keep track of the quality of their customer interaction at every touchpoint. It serves up insights into what customers need, their opinions, feedback, and how they respond to their outreach.
Business or marketing professionals can gain a clear understanding of the customer experience by monitoring these key metrics and trends. They can use this information to identify specific issues that need attention. This encourages the CX teams to make informed decisions to boost customer satisfaction. The ultimate result? Your business can achieve goals focused on customer centricity and securing positive business results.
Who benefits from a Customer Experience Dashboard?
A CX dashboard is critical for every stakeholder whose KPI is directly linked to how satisfied the customer is with the company. CEOs, CMOs, CS and CX heads get a clear snapshot of customer satisfaction and behaviors. This makes it easier to pinpoint where to invest their efforts.
Marketing folks love it because it shows them how well their campaigns are resonating with different customer segments. Customer service teams can’t get enough of it either. It helps them track interactions and resolve issues fast, keeping customers happy.
The ripple effect? The entire organization sees a boost—improved customer loyalty, more repeat business, and overall growth. This leads to a more customer centric organization culture that CEOs love. It’s a win-win situation for all involved.
6 Common Types of Customer Dashboard
Not all CX dashboards are cut from the same cloth. Whether it’s getting a bird’s-eye view of overall satisfaction or zooming in on the nitty-gritty details of individual interactions, there’s a dashboard for that.
Here are some common CX dashboards and how they can help businesses focus on what matters most to their customers:
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Dashboard:
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key metric widely used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. A Net Promoter Score dashboard provides critical information on NPS trends, feedback analysis, and customer loyalty metrics. By visualizing NPS data, businesses can understand the sentiment analysis, response rate, and customer needs assessment.
These dashboards help in tracking customer satisfaction scores over specific periods, identifying areas of improvement, and driving customer loyalty strategies.
2. Customer Satisfaction Dashboard (CSAT score):
A customer satisfaction dashboard focuses on tracking and visualizing customer satisfaction scores. It enables businesses to analyze customer feedback, response rate, and specific period trends.
The customer satisfaction data can help businesses get a better understanding of customer needs, key performance indicators, and areas of improvement. These dashboards serve as a valuable tool for customer service metrics analysis. This in turn will enhance customer satisfaction scores and encourage CX teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
3. Voice of the Customer Dashboard:
A Voice of the Customer (VOC) dashboard focuses on capturing and analyzing customer feedback from various sources. These dashboards visualize customer surveys, feedback analysis, sentiment analysis, and response rate.
A voice of the customer dashboard provides a comprehensive view of customer feedback trends integrating data from customer surveys, social media platforms, and other sources. CX teams can gain valuable insights into customer needs, sentiment analysis, and key performance indicators to scale business.
4. Customer Journey Mapping Dashboard:
A customer journey mapping dashboard provides powerful visualizations and insights into customer journey metrics. These dashboards enable businesses to track customer interactions, pain points, and key touch points throughout the customer journey.
Customer journey optimization dashboards play a crucial role in understanding customer needs, sentiment analysis, and loyalty trends. After analyzing the customer journey data, businesses can optimize marketing campaigns, personalize customer experiences and identify areas for improvement.
5. Website App Feedback Dashboard:
Website app feedback dashboards focus on capturing and analyzing customer feedback specific to website and app experiences. These dashboards provide valuable user data into user experience, response rate and specific period trends.
Website app feedback dashboards aid in optimizing user experience, identifying pain points, and delivering better customer experiences. Businesses can better understand customer needs, key performance indicators, and areas of improvement in their online platforms.
6. Online Reputation Management Dashboard:
In today’s digital era, online reputation management is crucial for businesses. An online reputation management dashboard allows businesses to monitor and analyze their reputation across social media platforms, review sites, and other online sources.
These dashboards visualize customer reviews- qualitatively and quantitatively (using sentiment analysis). Now businesses can proactively manage their online presence, address customer reviews, and improve customer sentiment. This also helps companies act on and handle negative feedback quickly, close feedback loop and protect their brand reputation.
What Makes A Customer Experience Dashboard Really Good?
6 Key Components to Follow.
A good CX dashboard should have the following components- Relevance, actionability, consistency, timeliness, visualization and ability to benchmark data sets.
Let us understand more about these 6 key components of a CX tool dashboard:
- Relevance of a dashboard:
Every customer satisfaction metric should be directly related to the customer experience and align with the business objectives. For example, if your objective is to improve customer satisfaction, you may want to track metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES).
- Getting actionable data:
The metric should provide actionable insights that can drive meaningful changes in the customer experience. It should help identify areas of improvement and guide decision-making. For instance, tracking metrics like customer churn rate or average handling time can highlight areas where improvements are needed.
- Consistent and measurable metrics:
The data on the dashboard should be reliable and accurately measurable. The measure itself should be consistent and should not change over time or with type of user or usage. For example, “engagement” as a metric might have different meanings for different stakeholders ( marketing, sales, or customer support). Therefore, it is important to define the metric clearly and ensure that it can be consistently measured across all relevant touchpoints.
- Offering real-time insights:
The data control panel should provide real-time or near real-time customer data to capture customer experience accurately. Waiting for weeks or months to gather data may lead to missed opportunities and delayed actions. With the fast-paced nature of business today, it is crucial to have timely metrics that reflect the current state of customer experience.
- Easy to understand visualization:
All dashboard results should be easy to understand and visualize. A dashboard is meant to present data in a visually appealing way that can be easily interpreted by stakeholders. Using charts, graphs, or other visual elements can help convey information more effectively.
- Benchmark against competitors:
The metric should allow for benchmarking against industry standards or competitors. By comparing performance with others in the same industry, organizations can gain insights into their relative strengths and weaknesses in customer experience. This is one of the reasons why Net Promoter Score (NPS) became a very popular metric for CX.
How to Build an Effective Customer Experience Dashboard?
Building an effective customer experience dashboard requires a systematic approach and attention to key steps. Let’s explore the steps to build an effective customer experience dashboard:
Step 1 – Clearly Define Your Goals and KPIs
Before diving into metrics, it’s crucial to establish your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the customer experience dashboard. This involves understanding what you aim to achieve, such as improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, or overall business outcomes. By setting clear goals and identifying relevant KPIs, you can ensure that the metrics you track are aligned with your objectives.
Step 2 – Identify the Metrics that Matter
With your goals and KPIs in mind, the next step is to determine the specific metrics that will provide actionable insights to drive better customer experience. For example, if your goal is to boost customer loyalty, metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores would be valuable to track.
Step 3 – Evaluate and Select Data Sources
Once you’ve identified the metrics, it’s time to determine the data sources you’ll need to integrate into your customer experience dashboard. This includes your CRM system, customer feedback channels (e.g., surveys, call centers, website pop-ups), and any other relevant sources such as social media or review sites.
Remember, while unsolicited sources like social media can provide additional insights, they may also increase the complexity and maintenance requirements of your dashboard. Consider the trade-offs carefully, and evaluate whether real-time data access is a critical requirement for your business.
Step 4 – Integrate and Consolidate Data
With your data sources selected, the next step is to integrate and consolidate the data into a single, cohesive platform. This may involve data cleaning, handling missing values, structuring data, and applying data analytics techniques to ensure accuracy and consistency.
Step 5 – Enable Drill-Downs and Segmentation
To make the data truly actionable, consider enabling drill-downs and segmentation capabilities within your dashboard. This could involve segmenting data by customer demographics, product categories, geographic locations, or any other relevant factors that can provide deeper insights into the customer experience.
Step 6 – Visualize the Data Effectively
Effective data visualization is key to making your customer experience dashboard easy to understand and interpret. Leverage charts, graphs, and other visual elements to present the metrics and insights in a clear and compelling manner.
Step 7 – Monitor and Analyze Continuously
With your dashboard set up and the data flowing in, it’s essential to monitor and analyze the metrics continuously. Regularly review the data to identify trends, patterns, and potential areas for improvement in the customer experience.
Step 8 – Take Action and Optimize
Armed with the insights from your customer experience dashboard, it’s time to take action and optimize the customer journey. Identify pain points, bottlenecks, and areas for improvement, and implement strategies to enhance the overall customer experience.
Step 9 – Educate and Train Your Team
Implementing a customer experience dashboard is just the first step; ensuring that your team understands how to effectively utilize it is equally crucial. Dedicate time and resources to educate and train your team members on the dashboard’s features, functionalities, and data interpretations.
Step 10 – Embrace Continuous Improvement
Customer experience is an ongoing journey, and your dashboard should evolve alongside your business. Regularly review and refine your strategies, metrics, and data sources. This should be done to ensure that your dashboard remains relevant and effective in driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Best Practices for Building a CX Dashboard: Focus Design and Usability
When it comes to making a CX dashboard for your organization everyone loves and adopts focus on its design, actionability and usability. Here are some golden rules to ensure your dashboard hits the mark:
1. Align internal stakeholders
Before you dive into design, make sure all the key players in your team are aligned. Understand what each stakeholder needs from the dashboard. Consider scheduling a meeting or workshop where all key stakeholders can gather and discuss their requirements. This collaborative approach promotes transparency and encourages open communication amongst team members. By collating information from different departments, you can gain insights into the specific metrics, visuals, and dashboard functionalities.
Capture each stakeholder’s perspective and take notes on their specific needs and expectations. Look for common themes or patterns that emerge from their feedback. This will give you a clear direction for designing your dashboard in a way that meets the needs of everyone involved.
2. Integrate Data from Multiple Sources for Analytics
To truly understand the customer journey, it is important to gather data from various touchpoints. Some of the key touchpoints that can be integrated into a comprehensive CX dashboard:
- CRM systems [Mandatory]: CRM systems provide valuable customer data, such as contact information, purchase history, and interactions. By integrating this data into the CX dashboard, organizations can gain insights into individual customer behavior but also drill the CX metric down by parameters like location, customer type, product type, touchpoint etc.
- Customer feedback channels [Mandatory]: This is where your customer response is coming from. A structured question(s) that captures the customer’s response to the metric in a standardized manner is a prerequisite. This could be administered using a survey form or an a IVR based response after a call
Bringing in optional channels like social media platforms, review sites, website analytics can potentially make the CX dashboard richer and more powerful.
Build a schema that would help you understand where the specific data point is being extracted from. Identify the key data sources that need to be integrated into your customer experience dashboard. Thereafter, it’s important to create a schema that outlines where each specific data point is being extracted from. This will help you ensure that the data is accurate and has no gaps or inconsistencies in your analysis.
Consider working closely with your IT team or data analyst department. Together, you can map out these integrations and establish a seamless flow of information between different systems and tools. This will streamline the data collection process and enable real-time updates.
3. Ensure that the Data is Current and Up-to-Date
Customer experience dashboards provide real-time data analysis for businesses to stay updated and make data-driven decisions. This brings ahead critical information on CX metrics, response rate, customer sentiment analysis, and customer journey insights.
By monitoring real-time customer experience metrics, businesses can respond quickly to customer needs, address issues in real time, and deliver exceptional customer service. Empower businesses with up-to-date information, for better customer experience management and business outcomes.
4. Visualize Data for Better Understanding
Data visualization is the key element of an effective customer experience dashboard. Graphs, charts, and visual representations, enhances data analysis and makes it easier to interpret and draw valuable insights.
It allows you to present complex data in a simplified and visually appealing manner. Stakeholders can quickly grasp the overall picture and identify trends or patterns. This makes your insights more accessible, actionable, and impactful.
Choose the visual format that best suits the nature of your data and aligns with your objectives. If you have (and you should) multiple charts on your dashboard, arrange them logically.
The visual structure of the dashboard reduces the mental bandwidth to interpret the data. They get used to seeing the same layout every minute. Their eyes and mind automatically focuses on the numbers or charts that are important. Frequently changing this layout is a bad idea. Ensure that the dashboard visualization is acceptable to the stakeholders.
5. Build a User-Friendly Interface for Easy Navigation
The interface should provide ease of use, effective alerts, and visualizations, enhancing the overall user experience. With a user-friendly interface, businesses can access important customer experience data, metrics, visualizations, and insights seamlessly.
Easy navigation, alerts, visualizations, and widgets are key features of customer experience dashboards. It is now that the business can make data-driven decisions and optimize customer experiences effortlessly.
6. Ensure an Ease of Access
One of the key factors in adoption of a CX dashboard is its always-on, real-time data availability. Having up-to-date and accurate data at your fingertips allows you to make informed decisions and quickly address any issues or opportunities that arise.
It reduces incentives for individuals or departments to maintain different personal data silos (storing it locally- which leads to misalignment and inconsistencies). Another challenge that this will help solve is the practice of an individual downloading CX data and distributing it on-demand. With a baked-in access control system, the relevant stakeholders can access their data as and when required, without having to ask someone to download and share.
To know more on how to set up a CX program in your organization, listen to our podcast here .
Conclusion
Build an effective customer experience dashboard with Merren, a customer experience and feedback tool for marketing professionals. Use customizable widgets and data visualization, and get real-time data updates, on the dashboard with other systems and tools.
To see Merren works for any industry, sign up here for a 14 day free trial.