Does your dashboard deliver?

Effective customer experience services employ methodologies that strike a perfect balance between customer insights and measurable analytics. It is as important to understand and analyse data captured from digital channels, as it is to interact with and understand customers themselves.

To this end, dashboards are used by the majority of online businesses to provide clear presentations of business performance. A dashboard is a visual matrix that allows executives within an organisation to see at a glance how different areas of their business are performing in relation to targets. Modern dashboards use dials, arrows, ratings, charts, traffic lights and other visual indicators to offer snapshots of real-time performance or periodic summaries. In front of the right people, dashboards are extremely useful and immediate tools, presenting clear information regarding web analytics, e-commerce, website performance, customer satisfaction and more. But for others they can prove confusing and overwhelming.

A simple test of the effectiveness of a dashboard is to assess how many successful business decisions an organisation has made over a 12 month period based upon the business intelligence the dashboard delivers. If the answer is fewer than 12, then it’s likely that all that dashboard is providing is a feeling of fuzzy warm confidence, rather than living up to its full potential.

We’ve thought long and hard about why dashboards are so popular although only a few businesses rely on them to inform genuine business decisions.

Complexity and speed are obviously key factors. Some of the dashboards we’ve seen in the past have been impressive, consisting of as many as ten tabs offering up to 15 metrics per tab. However, despite measuring and displaying a wealth of metrics, it was often almost impossible to base any informed decisions on these. There was simply too much white noise, drawing the reader into complex displays of interacting metrics without providing them with any clear message or suggested actions as an output. One of the responses to this problem is to use synthetic scoring. These scores condense a range of metrics (for example traffic from natural search, paid search, email campaigns and external websites) into a single score which can then be monitored over time and against target, to provide a ‘health check’ of a whole section in one view, saving precious time.

Another factor is often the availability of development resources. Many of our clients know what they would like to change in their dashboards, but find that the cumbersome setup of their content management system (CMS), or the sheer lack of development resources, prevents them from implementing changes with a quick turnaround. While it is often difficult to have an impact on the resources available, this can be addressed by prioritising the findings and focusing on the ones with the highest impact or lowest effort ratio.

Finally, we’ve learned that it is essential to focus on actions rather than metrics. A dashboard is only as good as the business intelligence it provides. And the information is worthless if it isn’t translated into recommendations that can be executed easily. This ‘human factor’ in dashboarding is essential to bring the results to life and deliver value. So far we haven’t found a tool that can automate this human interpretation.

In the future we are likely to see more direct data feeds from dashboards into elements of business websites. If, for example, a specific pay-per-click (PPC) campaign overperformed and delivered a substantial contribution to the bottom line, why shouldn’t the budget for those keywords be topped up in real time? If a substantial number of people are accessing your product pages after 7pm, but your call centres close at 6pm, why not dynamically feed this information back to the business, possibly boosting sales by adjusting call centre operational hours? Some web analytics solutions already offer plug-ins for tools like Google Adwords or add-ons for multivariate testing. However, fully integrated customer experience dashboards are still rare.

These key challenges of current customer experience dashboards must be addressed if they are to live up to their full potential. Speed of discovery is essential, as is a clear focus on what is actually achievable. However it is the ability for dashboards to identify actions with a high and measurable business impact that will determine if they deliver.