Customer Experience Dashboards: 3 Types You Should Know

Whether you’re running a customer service, support or success team, the importance of customer experience cannot be emphasised enough. While most of us recognise this and how getting our customer experience (CX) right can give us a competitive edge, achieving this in practice is less simple. Yet, if you’re to deliver the best CX, your teams need the right people, to receive the right information, at the right time.

Fortunately, if you’re regularly capturing customer feedback and communicating this through an effective survey dashboard, you’ll be well placed to achieve that.

To help you, this blog will explore the topic of customer experience dashboards in more detail. We will also take a look at the three main types of CX dashboard—CSAT, NPS and CES—including some best practice tips for implementing them.

So, let’s get started.

Why CX dashboards matter to your wider business

While it may appear that the main purpose of a customer dashboard is to enhance your internal oversight of ongoing issues, customer dashboards can directly impact your ability to meet your wider business goals.

Here are some key ways they can make a difference.

Improves customer experience, engagement and satisfaction

Whether it’s through surveys, comments or customer service messages, your customers are continually providing you with feedback. And it’s crucial to listen to them, because if they don’t feel heard, they can easily begin to feel less connected to your brand and less likely to make a purchase as a result. The statistics back this up, with up to 75% of customers feeling unheard by businesses.

By contrast, with the right customer dashboards in place, you can quickly see what customers are saying, feeling and thinking, and pinpoint the root cause of any dissatisfaction. You can also swiftly address issues such as customer pain points through insights that are delivered automatically based on precise data.

As you start to react more efficiently to your customers’ needs and deliver the experiences they want, you should see your customer engagement, satisfaction and loyalty rates improving as a result.

Helps streamline operations and increase revenue

In order to boost their revenue brands are continually looking to improve their operational efficiency and productivity.

Regardless of their focus, customer dashboards can help these efforts by providing the bigger picture and the real-time data to achieve this. In fact, according to research 80% of companies reported seeing their revenues increase after implementing real-time analytics across their business operations.

However, this shouldn’t seem so surprising when you consider that real-time data helps teams pivot faster and improve on the go, rather than having to wait for periodic reviews of data and actions.

Creates data-drive insights that improve decision-making

Compared with having to take action based on siloed data and surface level insights, customer dashboards allow you to home in on the details to take data-driven actions. By leveraging sophisticated software to analyse your data rather than relying solely on human resources, you can generate insights that translate to effective action.

Smart customer dashboard technology can help you to manage data delivery, complete trend analysis, forecast and predict future trends, and reduce uncertainties. While this is also possible with human effort – it simply isn’t as effective or efficient. Customer dashboards can better display important data, so that your teams can take actions that will have a bigger impact.

Types of customer experience dashboards you should know

While there are a range of different customer dashboards you can use for your business, if you’re to improve your customer experience, there are three survey dashboard types you need to know about CSAT, NPS and CES.

The CSAT dashboard

The overall purpose of the customer satisfaction (CSAT) dashboard is to keep track of your customer satisfaction levels.

While the Net Promoter Score (NPS) was traditionally the metric used for measuring satisfaction, the emergence and growing popularity of the CSAT metric, means that it’s now the go to metric for measuring this.

Why you need a CSAT dashboard

Whether it’s being able to quickly identify and resolve developing issues before they become problematic or view great feedback or CSAT metric scores that inspire your staff to deliver even greater quality. It can be hugely beneficial when your service or support teams have a single CSAT dashboard, they can visit to gain a quick top-level overview of what’s happening with their customers’ satisfaction levels.

The good thing about SmartSurvey’s new Dashboard feature is that it provides all the flexibility you need to view your survey responses and dig down into the data in the way that best suits you.

Subsequently, if you’re regularly running customer satisfaction surveys through SmartSurvey and on the right plan to use our Dashboard feature, you could quickly build a single CSAT dashboard grid giving you an all-in-one view of data across key tiles that provides:

• Your ongoing CSAT metric score as and when customers answer your CSAT metric question
• An overview of how your CSAT score has changed over time with our CSAT trend line chart
• A visual illustration of the statistical breakdown of responses to a key survey question using a graph, bar, pie chart and more
• Continually updating responses to a key open-ended survey question, that also allows you to view the sentiment of your comments, whether good, bad or neutral using sentiment analysis tools 

All of this is achievable with our Dashboard feature and more.

The NPS® dashboard

While the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) dashboard can also help you to gauge customer satisfaction, it helps track customer loyalty too, which is even more valuable to a business in terms of strategic planning based on its most loyal and long-standing customers.

Besides data based on customer answers to your NPS metric question, your NPS dashboard helps you to see the responses to any wider questions you may have asked in your NPS survey. This can be displayed in a range of visuals such as NPS score charts, NPS trend line charts and individual responses to open-ended questions, so your teams can quickly see what they need to action.

Why do you need an NPS dashboard?

For any company it’s vital to retain as many customers as possible, and even more so if you operate under a SaaS business model, which relies on repeat subscriptions.

One of the most effective ways to achieve this is to better understand your customers perception of your brand and your product’s value. While NPS surveys help you collect the data that helps you to gauge how likely your customers are to recommend you to others, you still need to be able to analyse and interpret that data. This is where the value of using an NPS dashboard comes to the fore in helping you draw insights from your NPS responses.

So, whether you want to view the breakdown of your organisation’s promoters, passives and detractors based on their answers to your NPS metric question or see how your NPS score has changed over time to compare your performance with others. With the right NPS dashboard in place your teams can do all of this, as they’re able to see everything they need at any one time.

Once again, the great thing about SmartSurvey’s new Dashboard feature is that it provides the performance and agility for your teams to see all your survey responses, while homing in on what’s most important to them.

Consequently, if you’re frequently running NPS surveys through SmartSurvey and you're on the Enterprise Plus plan that allows you to use our Dashboard feature, you could quickly create a single NPS dashboard grid that gives you a top-level view of data across key tiles that provides:

• A real-time picture of your NPS metric score as and when customers answer your NPS metric question
• A percentage breakdown of the overall customer response to your NPS metric question by group including your detractors, passives and promoters
• A top-level view of how your NPS metric score is changing over time with our NPS trend line chart
• Tools such as sentiment analysis and text analysis that help you to gain more context behind any open-ended survey questions your respondents have answered

All this can be achieved with our Dashboard feature and more.

The CES Dashboard

The final dashboard you need to know about if you’re committed to improving your customer experience levels is the customer effort score (CES) dashboard.

By enabling you to see responses to your CES metric question, and any wider questions related to this in your CES survey, your CES dashboard helps you to keep track of how much effort it’s taking customers to interact with you.

Why do you need a CES dashboard?

Reduced customer effort is a key factor driving customer satisfaction and loyalty, particularly in areas such as the improvement of time-to-resolution of customer service tickets.

Subsequently, if you’re frequently running CES surveys and the CES metric question at key customer touch points, you can see how much effort it’s taking customers to interact with you. However, if your customers are having real difficulties interacting with you at specific touch points, you need to know about it right away, which is where the benefit of using a CES dashboard comes in.

So, whether you want to quickly see the percentage breakdown of how easily customers are interacting with you at a key touch point like your website or how your CES score has changed over time. A single CES dashboard of all of these metrics can help your teams to quickly see what’s going on and how urgently they need to address a particular issue before it becomes more problematic.

With SmartSurvey’s new Dashboard you have the flexibility and performance to view and act on these issues, and always be able to prioritise what’s most urgent for you to act on next.

Subsequently, if you’re regularly running CES surveys through SmartSurvey and your plan allows you to use our Dashboard feature, you could quickly build a single CES dashboard grid which gives you an all-in-one snapshot of your data across key tiles that provides:

• A continually updating CES metric score as and when customers answer your CES metric question
• A percentage breakdown of the overall customer response to your CES metric question from very easy to very difficult
• An overview of how your CES score has changed over time with our CES trend line chart
• An ongoing view of the responses to any open-ended questions you’ve decided to include from your CES surveys, with analysis of that data provided by tools including text analysis and sentiment analysis

All this can be achieved with our Dashboard feature and more.

Best practice tips for implementing CX dashboards

Irrespective of the CX dashboards that you’d use, it’s essential you do everything you can to get the most out of them.

Here’s some best practice tips to help you with this.

1. Pinpoint key metrics and performance indicators

If you can establish early on what metrics you want to track and which KPIs are the most important for you to work towards, you’ll be able to customise your CX dashboards more effectively. Rather than viewing everything, it will help you to narrow down your dashboard visualisations to the key data insights your teams need to work effectively.

2. Create automatic data feeds and alerts

If you miss out on a key action or some flagged data, it can seriously hamper your ability to deliver on your customer promises.

If you can set up an automated system of data feeds and alerts that you can integrate with other software that your teams typically use, it can help to eradicate silos and ensure critical information is always seen when its needed.

A good example of this is the SmartSurvey Salesforce Survey Integration functionality we offer for our Enterprise plan customers. This allows customers using Salesforce to create live bespoke reporting dashboards, where critical survey data such as NPS, CSAT, CES metric scores and more can be continually fed through from SmartSurvey to their frontline teams.

Having all this data from multiple touchpoints at their fingertips, gives them a complete picture of their customer experience at any one time, so they can respond better to sales, support and other crucial customer interactions.

3. Set clear benchmarks and goals

If you’re to improve your operations and your customer experience, your dashboard needs to work effectively.

To avoid building dashboards that don’t meet your needs, it’s prudent to establish clear goals for how your dashboards will be used and performance benchmarks. Doing this will help to ensure that your organisation and teams get the most out of your investment.

4. Train staff and stakeholders

Finally, if your employees are to get the most out of the dashboards, they must be able to customise and utilise them to maximise their performance.

Subsequently, you’ll need to provide adequate training, so they know how to get the information they need from your dashboards. Your stakeholders may need training too, so they can easily pull off reports and obtain key information when it’s required.

Concluding thoughts

Having explored customer experience dashboards in a bit more depth, including their benefits and the most popular CX dashboard types, we hope you’ll feel better informed about the subject and their value to your business.

One of the most important things to remember is that whatever dashboard set up you decide on, those that need it know exactly how to use it and communicate its insights to others. This is crucial if you going to deliver a better customer experience.