Building a CX Dashboard

If you’re running a CX program, you need a way of communicating your progress to your superiors and the broader organisation. We are all guilty of not communicating enough on occasion..so what’s required is something that will break down the walls of the CX department allowing everyone in the business to see how the organisation is performing relative to customer expectations and its targets. And this is both as a whole, as well as within specific departments responsible for different parts of the customer journey.

The instrument that many companies use to do this is a CX dashboard and it has many benefits:

• It is an easy-to-understand report card on your organisation’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 organisational responsiveness because “red flags” or declining trends over time 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 the metrics that are important.

If you’re creating your company’s first CX dashboard, the first question you’re probably going to ask yourself is: “what needs to be on it?”. But take a step back. The first question you should be answering is: “who will be reading it?”. The information that goes into it will be determined by who will be consuming it.

Executives will want the headlines. They will want your customer satisfaction (or Perception) metrics such as NPS, CSAT, and CES shown overall and by journey stage. They will also want to see the key operational (or Descriptive) metrics and 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 organisational goals and could 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) or may want more than the headline metrics (they may, for example, be the head of a department that is responsible for a specific part of the customer journey who wants to dive deeper into that particular area).

Now, how do you select which operational metrics you display on your dashboard? Just as not every touchpoint is equal on a customer journey map (some touchpoints - “Moments of Truth” - have a higher impact on customer perception than others), some metrics will measure things 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 gain that understanding involves regression analysis on customer feedback data which is well outside the realm of this post so I’m going to leave that for another day. The point I’m trying to make is: show the top one or two operational metrics that have the highest influence on customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages.

In my last role where I was managing the CX program for a large, nationwide telecommunications company I created a dashboard which had all the headline metrics on the first page (which satisfied executives and 90% of readers) but had an additional 4 pages of data to satisfy the needs of the other 10% who wanted more granular detail. I also added some commentary to provide some context both overall and by journey stage.

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.

At the telco, I produced my dashboard monthly and distributed it via email to a group of senior stakeholders who then cascaded it to their teams. But CX dashboards can be integrated with other established dashboards, put on intranet pages, displayed on screens in the office, even printed and placed on a wall in the contact centre. Do whatever you need to do to make it visible and keep it front of mind.

I hope that’s helped any of you who are creating your first CX dashboard. If you have any further questions please feel free to reach out to me!

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Ben Motteram is a passionate evangelist for putting the customer at the heart of everything a business does. He has over 20 years' experience developing and implementing customer acquisition and retention strategies in strategic Sales, Marketing and Customer Experience roles. Determined, energetic, and continually learning, his success can be attributed to a dedication to understanding and consistently exceeding customer expectations.

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