Maximize Customer Experience: Essential Tips for Designing Your First CX Dashboard

The Gist:

A CX dashboard is a vital ingredient of any CX program. Adopting a CX dashboard can vastly improve engagement of staff and executive sponsorship.
Identify your audience. Knowing what customer experience metrics executives will be looking for will help you select key information and statistics.
Select your metrics carefully. Choose CX metrics that matter and will make an impact on your audience.

Humans aren’t perfect, which means we’ve all been guilty of poor communication both inside and outside of work. However, if you’re running a CX program, it’s essential to establish ways to communicate your progress to your superiors and the organization at large.

Let’s take a look at how to go about creating your own CX dashboard.

To do this, you’ll need to break down the walls of your CX department and allow everyone in the company to see how you're performing relative to customer expectations and company targets.

Why You Should Implement a CX Dashboard

The instrument that many companies use to do this is a CX dashboard. It has many benefits, including the following:

A CX dashboard is an easy-to-understand report card on your organization's CX that enables readers to look at a variety of sources of information to gain a holistic understanding of how the company is performing.
It facilitates organizational responsiveness because, over time, “red flags” or declining trends are easily discerned.
It raises awareness in and engages employees in what you’re trying to achieve in the CX department by connecting achievement of CX outcomes to business success.
It helps you, as a CX manager, focus on what’s important.

If you’re creating your company’s first CX dashboard, you may be wondering what needs to be on it. But take a step back. Although the makeup of your dashboard is important, the first question you should be asking is: “who will be reading it?” The information that goes onto your CX dashboard is going to be determined by who will be consuming it.

An open laptop displays a business dashboard on the screen and two coffee mugs, some paper and a pencil are on the desk as well in piece about CX dashboards. — The information that goes onto your CX dashboard is going to be determined by who will be consuming it. Blue Planet Studio

For starters, executives will want headlines. They’ll want to see your customer satisfaction (or perception) metrics such as NPS, CSAT and CES — both compositely and by journey stage. They will also want to see the key operational (or descriptive) metrics. While these will be different for every company, I’ll help you identify which ones you need to be tracking a little later.

Finally, they will also want to see the key outcome metrics, which measure what action customers took as a result of their perceptions. These are the metrics that tie customer experience to organizational goals and may include things like sales figures, number of complaints, number of positive online reviews or number of demos requested.

Others recipients of your dashboard may want the information broken down in more detail (for example, by customer journey stage, product type or customer segment). They may also want more than the headline metrics (if, for example, they’re the head of a department that’s responsible for a specific part of the customer journey who wants to dive deeper into that particular area).

Determining What Goes on Your Dashboard

Now that we’ve established who the target audience is, it’s time to determine how to select which operational metrics you display on your dashboard.

Just as not every touchpoint is equal on a customer journey map (for example, touchpoints like the “Moments of Truth” have a higher impact on customer perception than others), some will measure factors that have a higher impact on customer satisfaction than others. The key here is to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages.

How you attain that knowledge involves using things like regression analysis on customer feedback data, which is outside the realm of this post. However, the point I’m trying to make is that showing the top one or two operational metrics that have the highest influence on customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages is paramount.

The next thing to consider is how often you’re going to distribute it. Make no mistake: dashboard fatigue is very real so you need to balance engaging employees in the company’s CX efforts with information overload.

How I Managed My CX Dashboard

In my last role, I managed the CX program for a large telecommunications company. I created a dashboard, which had all the headline metrics on the first page — which satisfied executives and 90% of readers — and had an additional four pages of data to satisfy the needs of the other 10% who wanted more granular detail. I also added commentary to the first page to provide some context both overall and by journey stage.

While working for this company, I produced my dashboard monthly and distributed it via email to a group of senior stakeholders, who then forwarded it to their teams. CX dashboards can be integrated with other established dashboards, put on intranet pages, displayed on screens in the office and even printed and placed on walls. At the end of the day, do whatever you need to do to make it visible and keep it front of mind.

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