3 ways to create great experience dashboards and improve your digital success

For high-performing digital products and services, experience dashboards are a vital tool to keep the team focussed on what really matters – the customer. An experience dashboard must help you and your team monitor KPI’s and drive priorities and actions.

Experience (or customer experience) dashboards are about delivering the right data, in the right format, to the right member of the team, at the right time. Most of all, these dashboards should be tools to help you make better, more customer-centric decisions so you can maintain focus on the continuous improvement of your digital experience. A strong digital experience dashboard will help;

• Deliver connected, seamless customer experiences
• Gain greater visibility into journey performance across the organisation
• Create a single repository of performance data
• Make customer experience goals and experience design decisions 
• Improve service performance

Data sources for these dashboards vary, but typically include behavioural data like web analytics, the curation of customer feedback and measures like NPS & customer satisfaction, transactional data and technical information like uptime and crash reporting. Bringing these sources together in a coherent way that supports your strategy and roadmap is critical to getting people onboard and keeping them onboard with your digital experience program.

With that in mind here are 3 ways to improve your experience dashboards and their impact on the business, and your digital success:

1. Create audiences everywhere

Successful experience management involves lots of people within an organisation, from the board and the CEO to the front line. In fact, democratising this information and making as many people as possible understand and use it is often critical to the success of digital experience programmes. So create dashboards that differ significantly for different stakeholders, depending on their needs and the information that can support their role. 

We typically see 3 levels with strategic dashboards for the c-suite showing only the highest-level KPIs and flagging immediate needs. Here alignment with business challenges and objectives is critical to keeping the team focussed on the right areas, and the board hearing the right noises. Analytical dashboards will be used by middle tier managers and analysts and so may be more flexible to enable teams to deep dive to uncover crucial granular insights to improve the experience. Finally operational dashboards will be in the hands of the people on the ground like support teams so you want to be providing them with real-time information and performance data to support their work. 

Work carefully on getting the right information for the right people, and share your dashboards with everyone in the organisation who could benefit from better customer understanding. A culture that celebrates data and focuses on the customer is a key indicator of digital transformation success.

2. Obsess with the customer, obsess with improvement

The dashboard’s goal is to provide insight across the entire customer journey, but not everyone starts with a clear picture of that. It is important to appreciate that everyone’s dashboards evolve and develop. As customer understanding improves and business priorities change, dashboards must be continuously refined to serve the targeted audience and enable sound decisions. Better to start with a basic dashboard and improve, than wait months for one with all the data and lose focus on what is important.

Aim to start by providing a comprehensive view that includes high-level KPIs across each stage of the customer journey. This will help you get familiar with the situation and identify the key moments of the journey where customers appear to be experiencing pain points. An additional, more in-depth view that allows you to investigate further into a specific stage of the customer journey to identify specific types of issues customers may be experiencing. Ultimately another view that allows you to dig down to the personal experience of one user can provide much more visceral feedback and drive experience improvements.

Create a pathway to drive your dashboards to improve over time, you will have challenges around data availability, speed, coverage and even cost that may need to be overcome – the important thing is build that culture of continuous improvement. 

Once you have determined what really needs to be there, then select the right way to present each data point. Different types of charts have been designed to convey different types of information really well, so use a bar chart to compare data, or a line chart to show data over time, you don’t need to overcomplicate or be fashionable – it really needs to work so keep it simple. 

Beyond the data a good layout should have descriptive titles to help analysts quickly understand the data. The addition of filters and drill-downs is also really useful for providing in-depth access but be sure to maintain a strong naming and icon convention to reinforce contexts during this kind of navigation. 

Despite all this, dashboards can get cluttered, so once you have all the elements take some time (maybe with a designer) to lay everything out and establish clear hierarchical relationships between the elements and then test it with your users. There’s no better way to understand their needs and take your dashboard to the next level.

Find out more about how you can improve your digital strategy by taking our free Digital Performance Healthcheck or if you want to hear more get in touch to book a consultation.