Due to the lack of data, most customer service professionals struggle to triage requests and track customer sentiment over time. But that's not the case anymore. Customer experience dashboards resolve this issue—giving them more direction on what to focus on.
In this article, we'll take you through what a customer experience (CX) dashboard is, how it can benefit your organization, what to measure using it, and how to build one in four simple steps.
What is a customer experience dashboard?
A customer experience dashboard is a powerful tool for businesses looking to get the most out of their customer interactions. This data-driven platform provides invaluable customer insights into how customers engage with your brand by tracking key metrics such as satisfaction scores, effort scores, journeys, customer churn rate, and sentiment analysis.
Unless your customer experience (CX) is top notch—you won't be able to survive as a business. And many studies have proved that.
For instance, a recent report from Watermark Consulting found that if a company prioritizes CX as a function, they’re highly likely to outperform the market—almost 3 times more than those who don’t.
This dashboard helps you monitor customer feedback and measures the impact of changes over time. The intention is to always stay on top of your customer's needs, even as they keep changing with the seasons.
Why do you need a customer experience dashboard?
Let's say one of your customer service reps reports facing an influx of return requests for a specific product. But how do you know if it's just one rep's observation or a commonality across the board? This is where a customer experience dashboard can help. By surfacing these critical insights, you can quickly identify new areas for improvement and use cases for customer experience automation.
In the CX Leader podcast, Gary Szeszycki, Vice President of Client Services at Walker Information, says, "When you think about what our CX professionals have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, in most of their organizations, they actually have to compete for mind share with everyone else in the organization. Unless your entire company lives and breathes CX data, the only people that are going to be living and breathing CX data is you. And now you've got to bring that message to your organization."
Essentially these dashboards consolidate qualitative and quantitative data from different customer feedback channels and show you the customer health score of your business. You understand how customers interact with your products or services, enabling you to make informed decisions about optimizing the customer experience.
For instance, New Day USA, a mortgage company, noticed that 15% of their customers were opting out of their plans—costing them $400,000 in revenue each month. To avoid this, they investigated why this was happening and found that it was due to a lack of communication during the loan disbursement process. Eventually, they implemented an engagement program to keep them apprised—resulting in a 7% reduction in drop-off numbers and $200 million in additional revenue each month.
Also, you become data-driven over time and double down on what's working while improving areas of weaknesses before it's too late.
What can you measure with a customizable customer experience dashboard?
Here are a few customer service metrics you need to keep an eye on:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Measures customer satisfaction with a product or service, determined by gathering customer feedback through channels like surveys.
- Churn rate: Percentage of customers who stop working with a company over a set period. For example, if, on average, 5 out of 100 customers stop working with you, your churn rate is 20%.
- First contact resolution rate: Measures the percentage of customer support requests resolved on the first attempt by a customer service representative. The higher this number, the more efficient your customer support system is.
- Ticket volume: Represents the number of customer support requests a company receives over a given period. It is a crucial metric for tracking customer demand and helps companies allocate resources and prioritize support issues.
- Average resolution time: Measures the time for a customer support ticket to be resolved. The lower this number, the better your customer support system.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): A customer loyalty metric that measures if a customer is likely to recommend a company to others. Customers rate the product/service on a 10-point scale, with 10 being "highly likely to recommend."
- Customer retention rate (CRR): Measures the percentage of customers a company retains over a given period. If your CRR is high, it shows that your product meets the target market's needs and that customers are satisfied with the quality.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): It's a metric that measures the ease with which customers can resolve a support issue. For instance, if a customer has a problem with a product feature and they could fix it with a knowledge base article, it reduces the effort it takes on their part.
- Customer sentiment: It's a qualitative metric that measures the attitude and emotions of customers towards the brand. While this can change with time, your goal should always be to maintain a positive sentiment.
- Customer journey flows: This maps the path customers take when interacting with a company. It helps companies understand CX, identify areas where customers are encountering problems or expressing dissatisfaction, and take action to address them effectively.
- Topic insights: These represent the most common issues customers experience when interacting with a company. It shows common points of frustration, giving you data points on what support efforts to prioritize in the future.
How to build a customer experience dashboard in 4 steps
Let’s look at how you can create a customer experience dashboard for your organization:
1. Define your customer experience goals, KPIs, and metrics
By understanding the metrics used by your customers, you can uncover behavioral patterns, identify areas of improvement and create more personalized services—all of which are necessary for creating a successful CX Dashboard. Include a mix of these metrics:
- Perception metrics: How they feel about it (NPS survey, CES scores)
- Descriptive metrics: Observable events (First call resolution, Average Handle Time, Escalations)
- Outcome metrics: Actions customers took (Booked a demo, viewed a demo, etc.)
It’s crucial to choose qualitative and quantitative metrics so that the former supports and provides context to the latter.
For instance, you might see that a customer scored you a 7 on the NPS survey, but what's the context behind that? Were they unhappy with certain features, customer support, or something else? Including a text box and an AI-powered BI platform to analyze these insights would give you a better picture.
The most important metrics include customer satisfaction scores, retention rates, topic insights, and sentiment. By tracking these components over time, you'll better understand how your customers interact with your products or services—and where they'd like to see improvements.
2. Choose the right data sources for your dashboard
Choose the correct data sources for your dashboard. Platforms like Dimension Labs integrate with multiple channels like chatbots, voice, survey tools, SMS, and support ticketing systems to gather data from these sources. So, pick your channels and use our API to pull the data into your dashboard.
For example, surveys are an easy way to get direct feedback from customers. Reviews can provide valuable insight into customer needs and expectations. And monitoring social media conversations related to your brand can reveal much about what people think of your services or products.
3. Organize your data in Dimension Labs data platform
Choose a solution that integrates with your data sources and auto-organizes it. Dimension Labs' platform can help you do just that. It does that in three simple steps:
- Connect your data sources so that our natural language processing (NLP) model can run a qualitative analysis
- Automate the data organization process and convert unstructured data into a structured form
- Explore the extracted data and hone into areas of improvement and high satisfaction initiatives
4. Analyze the results and make informed decisions
Before you analyze the results, decide what you need to evaluate in the first place. In our experience, most clients like to focus on different metrics and change the dashboard's flow based on internal preferences. So, adjust the dashboard first and then begin the analysis process.
In the image below, you can see how we've grouped critical insights like total sessions, Key Activities, Topic Insights, Sentiment, and User Journey Flows on one interface. It gives users a high-level overview of qualitative metrics that shows how their customers perceive them at this very moment and the most critical issues they're facing. You can make faster data-driven decisions using this, as the proof is in the pudding.
Analyze the voice of your customer base with Dimension Labs
A customer experience dashboard is an essential tool for any customer support team as it helps you drill down into the customer health of your business. Dimension Labs' platform allows you to quickly build and customize your dashboard and effectively measure the metrics that are important to you. Integrating and organizing your conversational data into one place creates a single source of truth—giving you confidence in your support efforts.
Plus, as a customer support leader, you can increase your voice of the customer (VoC) data, automate the generation of actionable insights, and identify areas for cost savings so that you invest in channels that work best.
Are you interested in learning how Dimension Labs can help you create a customer experience dashboard for qualitative data? Book a demo with us today.
FAQs for Customer Experience Dashboards:
- What is a customer experience dashboard?
A customer experience dashboard is a tool businesses use to monitor and analyze customer interactions with their brands. It visually represents customer data, allowing companies to quickly identify customer experience trends, pinpoint issues, and evaluate customer satisfaction levels. By having a centralized location for all customer-focused metrics, businesses can make data-driven decisions that improve customer retention and loyalty.
- What should a customer experience dashboard include?
At a minimum, it should include customer satisfaction, feedback, and engagement data. It might also include key performance indicators such as most requested support topics, customer satisfaction scores, customer sentiment, average resolution rates, and customer journey flows.
- How do I create a customer experience dashboard?
You can create a customer experience dashboard in 4 simple steps:
- Define your customer experience goals, KPIs, and metrics
- Choose the right data sources for your dashboard
- Organize your data in a BI tool (Dimension Labs)
- Analyze the results and make informed decisions
When you do so, you create an automated dashboard that regularly pulls and analyzes data without manual data annotation from your end.