Designing Dashboards for the CX: Customer Experience

It’s no secret that the customer experience (CX) is critical to business success. However, creating a memorable customer experience doesn’t just happen from having a solid brand or an outstanding product, but rather from actual insight into past customer behavior, buying habits and individual feedback on a specific solution or event.

That said the ability to pull valuable conclusions about a business’ customers would be nearly impossible without an effective dashboard. To us, an effective dashboard not only gives a snapshot of accurate data, but also presents the data in a visually appealing way.

However, dashboard design is often easier said than done. Based on our customer’s experience with our Caller First Analytics (CFA), below are our recommendations around building an informative and useful dashboard:

Display productive data

A dashboard shouldn’t be a kitchen sink of all customer information. A dashboard should offer historical and current view of business data to enable employees to quickly identify trends. Additionally, these views should offer filtering options that are meaningful and directly connected to the business goals.

If the data is presented in a way that is tied to corporate, team and individual objectives – think key performance indicators – employees are enabled to not only make more data-driven decisions, but also enhance productivity and target improvements towards the CX.

Empower decision making, not reporting

While the customer priorities for each organization are significantly different, get in the mindset of employees and the additional audiences that will see this information to best determine what information would be helpful within a dashboard. With this perspective, priorities will be clear and information will be geared toward decision making vs. reporting for reporting’s sake.

Balance the design

A dashboard’s design shouldn’t overwhelm employees by the volume of data. Too many personalization features can defeat the purpose of the dashboard and begin creating analysts out of employees. A few do’s and don’ts around dashboard design:

• Do include visuals such as colors, branding or unique data and workflow formatting
• Don’t make it an eyesore and include too many contrasting colors
• Do enable context rules and include features that enable employees to quickly  share
• Don’t give inaccurate or dated information – as you can imagine, this defeats the entire purpose of a dashboard
• Do favor data clarity and ease of use over embellishment

Although dashboard design is far from easy, visually compiling a large amount of data in a way that can be easily understood and digested is one of the best ways to support business goals, provide the appropriate measurement to enable data-driven decisions and help specifically identify how the organization can improve its customer experience.

For more information on designing dashboards to enable business productivity and lead to an enhanced CX, check our tip sheet or contact us today!