Building an effective dashboard contributes to your company's success. It's a long-term project, but one that can bear fruit very quickly.
What's your dashboard for?
A dashboard is a handy tool that brings together data, sometimes from several sources, in one place. In the field of Customer Success, the data most often found in a dashboard relates to the health and satisfaction of your customers. What proportion of customers renewed their subscription this year? What percentage of customers have been satisfied over the last three months? How many people have contacted your customer service since the start of the week? And how quickly have your teams responded?
Rather than consulting this information in different solutions, which can be time-consuming, the advantage of the dashboard is that you can view everything on the same page.
Let's face it: if your goal is to track your employees through the data you collect on a daily basis... you're off to a bad start. Unfortunately, this is often the case in too many companies. Some see data as the ultimate supervisor of employees, like a judge handing out good and bad marks.
The healthy motivation that should be the foundation of your Dashboard project lies elsewhere. Rather, it lies in making effective decisions, motivated by concrete figures.
Let's start with a simple principle. Except in the childish world of Peter Pan, no argument can be sustained without data and figures to back up your point of view.
Come on, just between us... At least once in your career, you've had an idea that seemed brilliant, an intuition that seemed excellent. You suggested it to your manager, and hoped for immediate validation. It was so obvious! And then, in the end, your brilliant idea fell gracefully flat, because you had no data to back up your pitch.
I can imagine the scene:
" Okay, but how many customers have been impacted in the last six months by the problem you're bringing up? "
" Well, that is, a certain number of customers, that's not negligible ..."
And without precise figures, the point you've pointed out is on its way out the door. It will have had a long life. It will simply join the graveyard of unfinished projects.
Some of my customers often start with the same ambition: we'd like to change this process, we'd like to use this working method... Fine, but what are the figures? What would be the benefit of implementing this decision?
Deploy a dashboard as effective as a state-of-the-art GPS system
When building a dashboard, it's first necessary to build a coherent strategy.
There are two crucial steps in building a dashboard:
- Understand business sector indicators, to determine which will have the greatest impact
Here's an example from one of my customers.
He wanted to track the time taken to complete a series of specific, recurring tasks in the Support team. Estimating the time required for these actions was necessary to determine the ideal team size.
- Map the possible existence of data that can already be used
You may not realize it, but fantastic data can sometimes be available with just a few clicks. So this mapping exercise is a great way to start mining the goldmine beneath your feet.
For a SAAS company, I'm thinking of the time it takes to set up a new customer. You need to be able to track the progress of these tasks, to realize how long they take, and to better assess the size of the team required to complete them. In other words, data really can change your company's life (for the better!).
To start building your dashboard, you'll first need to draw up a list of indicators: what do you need? Which indicators already exist? Which ones should be created? How do I build these indicators? Is the data available? If not, how can I retrieve it?
Furthermore, you can't set up a dashboard without ensuring the reliability of the data. Personally, I use high-performance solutions such as Microsoft's Power BI, as well as Tableau.
Thanks to business intelligence tools, it's easier to understand if there are data errors, if seasonal trends stand out, if outliers or corrupted data pollute your reporting...
In other words, these tools are used to test the data, to determine whether any stand out from the crowd.
A very concrete example.
Your back office records certain information, such as the processing time of a task carried out by one of your Customer Success Managers. But is it really the time spent processing the ticket, or is it the time between receipt and resolution of the ticket? This is a question that the above-mentioned tools can help you to answer more quickly.
Another example.
An advertising company wants to calculate the browsing time of customers on an e-commerce site. To achieve this, it will note the time at which the user enters the page, and differentiate this from the time at which the user enters the next page. By identifying overly large, unrepresentative values, you can avoid distorting the figures displayed by your dashboard.
Be careful, however, not to fall into the trap of creating the ultimate dashboard. Yes, the one that will reveal all the truths of the universe by modifying a few filters each week.
Data isn't necessarily all-powerful. You have to identify the blind spots in your data, and live with them.
In all my professional experience, I've never seen an account where the data was perfectly clean, without the slightest impurity.
The dashboard builder's work is carried out over months, in iterations. Over a long period, we identify step by step the wolves, the data and indicators that need to be reworked, modified, deleted or corrected.
I prefer to launch a dashboard that I'll refine over time, rather than wait for the perfect data that will never arrive.
If we wait for the perfect data, we'll never be able to move forward, because we'll always be waiting for data correction, as the size of our Tech teams is often insufficient.
However, it is their availability that will largely determine the success of the project. By putting in place the various technical elements needed to collect this data, the members of these teams will be your best allies.
Building the dashboard involves a lot of back-and-forth with them. You'll tell them what metrics you need to track, and they'll take care of the physical implementation of the actions required to monitor the data.
It will therefore be necessary to do some translation work with the teams, giving them as much context as possible, so that they can identify the best way to provide you with the required data.
Data can be retrieved via multiple channels:
- Thanks to the developers in charge of the
- With trackers to monitor customer behavior
- Or CRMs such as Crisp or Intercom, which can be used for what is known asdata listening. Generally speaking, CRMs are also rich sources of data that can be extracted from
Some data will have to be collected manually, such as project management data. But others can be automated, such as retention rates and invoicing. It won't always be possible to receive everything automatically, but automations can be put in place, depending on volume and priorities.
To sum up:
- The dashboard is built in iterations
- We start with immediately available data
- And we integrate new data as we go along.
This process can take up to a year in total, or even longer, before all the data can be collected and organized automatically.
But let me reassure you. Fortunately, it won't take you that long to start using your data. Your first dashboard can be up and running within a month.
The benefits of a well-designed dashboard
Once your data has been brought together into a coherent whole, you'll be in a better position to manage your business.
The dashboard will answer questions that are as simple as they are crucial:
" Are my indicators satisfactory? Have I achieved the objectives I set myself? What actions do I need to take to keep the momentum going? "
The dashboard is also designed to meet the information needs of management committees, or simply investors. Investors don't need to know all the ins and outs of the company. Rather, they need to know how the teams and their results are faring. This is where the figures on your dashboard come in particularly handy, as they provide an overview of the business.
The famous "Big Picture".
After all, decision-makers are like you and me: they need figures to make decisions.
The end-user comes first
Data isn't just numbers, far from it.
When I create a dashboard, I want to bring to life the story that the data can reveal. I also put myself in the shoes of the people who will use this dashboard, to enable them to derive maximum benefit from it.
To achieve this, I test several representations so that the story told by the data is expressed in the simplest, most readable way possible.
To illustrate the data, there's nothing like visuals that speak for themselves, giving the famous "Wow effect". You can start simply, using the graphs used by the customer in Google Sheets, for example. But other, more professional tools will do just as well, such as Tableau, Power BI or CRM dashboards like Zendesk or Salesforce, to name but a few.
Another vital principle comes into play. Dashboard users need to be able to drive business and report as easily as possible, without having to spend hours setting filters and reading data. Ideally, they shouldn't even have to use filters. The data must be available immediately.
It's all about the end-user. They need to spend as little time as possible on the dashboard. Information must be as accessible and comprehensible as possible. A well-configured dashboard will display the necessary data directly.
I must confess, this is an obsession for me. The cycle I'm aiming for is frighteningly efficient. The user opens the dashboard, fiddles with a couple of filters, then leaves.
At first, I designed complex dashboards, with elaborate data cross-referencing. But in the end, this is rarely what the customer needs. The real need is almost always for easy business management and corrective action.
For this, there's nothing like simple indicators, which even someone who doesn't work in this field could understand. So it's best to keep an overview of the business, without going into too much detail. The question the dashboard must answer is disconcertingly simple, and can be summed up in three words:
" How are you? "
For all their qualities, managers are often more relational than analytical. Their job is to lead and manage a team, not to spend days poring over data. Their job is to manage a strategy, and the dashboard helps them monitor the development of that strategy.
So it's important to keep things simple, because if you overwhelm them with data, you risk losing them. It would be negative to overwhelm them with mountains of figures that they won't be able to translate into concrete action.
Data for all levels of understanding
I've stressed the simplicity of the indicators displayed in the dashboard. But more advanced users can also get their money's worth!
To meet all expectations, the dashboard can be split into two parts:
- First-level dashboard: ultra-simple, easy-to-read, focusing on macro-level activity
- Second level: for more advanced users, with a particularly fine level of detail
Be careful, however, not to dwell on indicators or cases that are too specific. While they can be useful in some cases, they risk wasting time in over-analysis.
Frequently, companies focus on 5% of cases, on subjects that are hardly representative of the company's real activity. My advice if this problem starts to show its head: change your point of view, and move up a level by monitoring a more global indicator.
Integrate dashboards into your Customer Success strategy
A few metrics seem to me to be relatively unavoidable when you want to implement a Customer Success strategy within your business:
- The attrition rate (the famous churn that's on everyone's lips)
- Monthly (or annual) recurring income (MRR/ARR in English)
- Utilization rate
- License coverage rate (e.g. your customer has purchased five features, but only uses one)
A dashboard project can be a good opportunity to start tracking certain indicators that you haven't taken into account until now.
Article written in partnership with Alexandre Amrhein Jaidi
