How to Build a Customer Experience Dashboard (+ Best Practices)

Tracking customer experience (CX) data is essential for businesses that want to boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention rates — and a CX dashboard can help with that.

CX dashboards offer visual representations of CX metrics and overall progress. They’re extremely beneficial to customer support leaders, but they can also be easily accessed across teams or used to update key stakeholders when you’re reporting on success metrics.

Let’s review how to create a CX dashboard and get the most value from it. 

What Is a CX Dashboard?

A CX dashboard displays essential CX metrics for businesses. Many virtual phone systems and contact center solutions may track metrics like customer satisfaction rates and average resolution time.  

In most cases, CX dashboards include data visualizations and real-time updates for the most critical customer support metrics. 

The Purpose of a CX Dashboard

CX dashboards have several core use cases that are invaluable to businesses of all sizes. Let’s discuss how they’re commonly used and the value they offer. 

Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs)

Use your CX dashboard to regularly monitor core KPIs that gauge the overall quality of customer interactions and your customer support team. Businesses of all sizes and contact centers should track this data. 

This includes customer insights and service metrics ranging from response times to conversation sentiments. 

Strong CX dashboards should provide real-time assessment of customer sentiments across products, services, customer support interactions, and even internal operations. This information comes directly from customer feedback data. 

Analyze trends and patterns

Knowing what’s happening right now is important, but businesses and contact centers should also use historical data to identify patterns and track trends over time. 

Doing so can help you detect common customer issues, agent performance patterns, and even peak call times quickly. It can also ensure you’re on the right track to improving the overall CX. 

Use this information to make changes that positively impact the CX. You can, for example, provide training to agents who are struggling to successfully resolve customer concerns and ensure that enough staff is on-hand to handle peak call periods. 

Analyze this data to pinpoint weaknesses in your service delivery. Common issues to watch for include long wait times, low resolution rates, and specific agent training needs. 

Improve customer journeys and experiences

Want to improve customer loyalty and customer retention rates along with it? CX dashboards are the first step.

Map out customer interactions across different channels and touchpoints, identifying opportunities for streamlining and personalizing the CX. 

You may realize, for example, that unhappy customers become exponentially frustrated if they have long call-wait times or need to be transferred to multiple departments. Incorporating an auto-attendant to route their call correctly the first time can increase customer satisfaction scores and first call resolution rates quickly. It’s a quick change, but it can make a significant impact on the overall experience. 

You can (and should) incorporate customer feedback into your analysis to continuously refine your approach to customer service and support. 

Taking this data-driven approach to understanding customer needs and creating a clear roadmap can help you optimize the customer journey and improve the CX like little else can. 

Related: 4 Proven Strategies for Optimizing Your Customer Journey

Report and communicate actionable insights

Get in-depth customer data that translates into accurate, actionable insights with strong CX dashboards — especially when they come with comprehensive visual representations of the data at hand. 

Regularly share dashboard insights with stakeholders through reports to drive an organizational focus on CX priorities. Insights from your dashboard can inform stakeholders about everything from staffing decisions to training programs and process changes, all aimed at enhancing the CX. 

At the end of the day, your CX strategy should be centered around data, and these insights can ensure that it is. 

How to Build a CX Dashboard

When you’re ready to take CX management to the next level, you need to know how to build a CX dashboard that will benefit your team most. You can do this in six easy steps. 

1. Define clear objectives

When building your CX dashboard, you need to identify the specific goals you want to focus on when optimizing customers’ support or contact center experience. 

Most businesses will have goals related to customer satisfaction rates, service efficiency, and resolution effectiveness, all of which are interrelated. If customers are able to have problems resolved in just one short phone call rather than three, for example, your efficiency, resolution, and customer satisfaction rates can all increase quickly.

2. Select relevant KPIs

After choosing your goals, it’s important to choose metrics that help you evaluate progress towards those objectives. 

Common examples of KPI metrics for customer support teams and contact centers include: 

• Average handle time: The average duration of any customer service interaction
• First call resolution rate: The number of times your support team can resolve a problem within the first call from a customer
• Customer satisfaction score: Customers’ happiness after purchasing from or interacting with your business, based on surveys sent to the customer
• Net promoter score: Customer loyalty, including how likely an existing customer is to refer you to someone, based on customer survey answers
• Customer effort score: The ease with which customers can achieve their goal when interacting with your business, whether it’s making a purchase or solving a problem
• Expansion Revenue: Revenue that’s generated after the customer’s initial purchasing price or contract 

3. Integrate data sources

Many businesses and contact centers have CX data spread out across multiple tools and platforms. You can get all the information you need in one place by aggregating data from your VoIP or call center systems, CRM programs, call recording tools, and customer feedback platforms. All this provides a holistic and complete view of CX data. 

Choose software that offers data reporting or synching functionality through integrations or APIs to help with this. Nextiva, for example, integrates with popular CRMs and help desk software. 

Related: Nextiva’s VoIP integrations fit perfectly into your existing business ecosystem.

4. Design for usability

When building your CX dashboard, focus on a user-friendly interface that provides easy access to real-time data and historical trends. 

You want a clean interface with logical organization. Ideally, it should incorporate visual elements like graphs, charts, or heat maps for better data representation. Make sure you choose a platform that’s easy to navigate and understand. 

5. Implement real-time monitoring

The reporting dashboard you use should have the ability to display real-time data, allowing you to promptly identify and address potential issues as they come up.

If, for example, average customer satisfaction rates are plummeting out of nowhere, you want to be able to catch it immediately and determine what’s causing it. It may be caused by a new contact center staff member who isn’t able to successfully resolve customer concerns, for example, or a manufacturing defect in a brand’s product that may have caused a surge of unhappy customers. 

Either way, the closer you can monitor the CX in real time, the better. 

6. Ensure customization and scalability

Every business and contact center is unique, and your CX dashboard should show you the data that’s important to your brand. Customization with views, filters, and even dedicated custom reporting can help you track specific goals and needs for your business both now and as you grow and scale over time.

Best Practices for Dashboard Reporting

To get the most out of your CX dashboard after you’ve built it, keep these five best practices in mind: 

1. Tailor reports to your audience

You’ll likely share data from your CX dashboard with multiple different audiences within your business. Tailor your reports, including the focus of the report, the metrics you select, and the level of detail based on the audience in question.

Executives, managers, and frontline staff may all need to see different data, so create custom reports to ensure relevance and clarity. You also want to emphasize the most critical findings, trends, and actionable insights at any given point to better guide decision-making. 

2. Use clear and concise visuals

Visual data representation leverages charts, graphs, and other visuals to break down complex data into an easy-to-understand and accessible display. It’s much easier to track trends and patterns, and seeing visual data can be more impactful on decision makers.

While visualizations are powerful, remember to keep them straightforward and simple. Avoid overcrowding them with too much information, which can be distracting and confusing and dilute the impact of key data points. Stick to the KPIs that help prove your point. 

3. Focus on actionable insights

Data is just data — it’s up to you to determine what those insights mean and how you can leverage them to improve the CX and support agent performance.

To do this, focus on actionable insights. Which metrics clearly present opportunities for potential improvement, innovation, and growth based on current performance?

Pair insights with concrete recommendations for specific actions that can address potential concerns or capitalize on opportunities where possible during your presentation.

If your first call resolution rate is low and customer satisfaction rates are also low, for example, that’s a clear indicator that customers may be getting frustrated with drawn-out resolutions. Taking steps to improve your first call resolution rates, by supplying more detailed guidelines to call support agents or providing easy access to managers, can drive improvement. 

4. Ensure accuracy and reliability

If you’re basing business decisions around CX data, you must make sure the metrics you’re looking at are correct.

Verify data integrity by regularly checking the accuracy of all data in your dashboard. Ensure that KPIs and metrics are both clearly defined and applied consistently over time for accurate real-time and trend analysis. 

Look at all of the individual data sources to make sure that they’re consistent and accurate. One customer support platform may measure net promoter scores on a different scale compared to another, so understanding the data you’re looking at is key. 

5. Provide context and analysis

When sharing reports, it’s often important to offer analysis on why certain trends occur or the implications of data variances. This can provide a great deal of context to raw data, which can help you identify potential problem areas or opportunities. 

And keep in mind that internal actions aren’t the only things that drive internal performance. External influences may also impact performance metrics, including marketing changes or seasonal trends. 

For example, customer sentiment or satisfaction rates may drop steeply for a hospitality business that has to cancel all reservations due to an impending hurricane. 

Even if the business in question is able to offer discounted rebookings, a certain segment of customers are unlikely to be happy with the solutions offered. That’s an external factor, and a temporary drop in satisfaction rates may decline while average call handling times increase, though ideally first call resolution rates will stay consistent. 

Effective CX Dashboards Start With CX Software

CX dashboards can be invaluable to businesses of all types (call centers included). They can provide a much better understanding of your customers’ journey and how they are being supported. 

It’s crucial, however, that you start with strong CX software, which can provide all the key metrics and data you need. That starts with a proven contact center solution like Nextiva. 

Nextiva’s omnichannel software aggregates conversations from every digital channel (social media, VoIP phone, and ticketing desk software included) to compile CX data into a single place.

We have powerful voice analytics to track call center performance alongside CX and conversation data for all digital platforms. 

This enables businesses to work smarter, better identify areas for improvement or optimization, and consistently deliver better customer value through human customer support and AI-powered live chat. 

Resolve customer issues fast, improve the efficiency of your support team, and improve the overall CX with Nextiva’s digital service channels today. 

Related: Customer Experience Analytics: How to Track and Improve CX