Customer service and support leaders often find themselves drowning in data, relying on a complex mix of monthly reports, spreadsheets, and dashboards to make sense of their organizations' performance. In fact, 83 percent of service leaders reported that poor data quality was a barrier to their organizations' success in a recent Gartner survey. For service organizations that rely on a consistent and connected view of performance across multiple channels and systems, this way of working is not sustainable.
To understand and communicate the performance and value of the service function overall, leaders must work proactively to guide their teams to develop single connected management dashboards. This dashboard should serve as the focal point for all conversations on cross-channel service performance, highlighting service contributions to wider business success, and enabling the fast identification of performance issues and other defects.
Before they can guide their teams toward developing a new management dashboard, customer service and support leaders need a clear idea of what good actually looks like.
A top-level management dashboard should be concise and clearly demonstrate the relationship between key business, strategic and operational metrics, while providing an easy-to-understand reporting structure. Cross-channel performance data should be combined to present a single unified view that encompasses financial, operational and voice-of-the-customer insights. Individual performance trends should be easily accessible by clicking into each of the top-level metrics, preserving the front-page view for communication and discussion of overall performance.
Core to the development of a high-quality management dashboard are the following five key principles:
- Simple: The dashboard should show as few metrics as possible, focusing attention on only what is important without being afraid to include white space on the screen.
- Actionable: Performance issues should be highlighted with a clear color-coded system, additional trends being accessible with drill-through to understand performance drivers.
- Connected: Insights from multiple systems and channels should be connected to present a consistent view of performance that informs overall service management.
- Automated: Data from multiple systems should be integrated into the dashboard automatically, with a refresh performed on a regular and reliable basis.
- Used: The dashboard should be used in all service management conversations, providing a single source of truth for the service management team.
Steps for Designing a Management Dashboard
To lead the organization to designing a new dashboard, customer service and support leaders must engage in a multi-step process that will likely take one to two months to complete.
Step 1: Agree on the Objectives.
Service leaders and their teams should start by collectively considering their insight needs. When discussing these, highlight that the intention of this dashboard is to understand the overall performance of the function, and as such it should encompass the function's overall business objectives (e.g. reduce cost, increase loyalty), strategic metrics (e.g. cost to serve, customer effort score) and correlated operational measures (e.g. first-contact resolution, self-service containment).
It is advisable not to include individual team or agent performance metrics in this view, as this can overcomplicate things. Instead ensure the focus remains only on the key metrics needed to manage the function as a whole.
Step 2: Articulate the Requirements.
Next, engage the analytics team, which will work to understand the key objectives and build the dashboard. The role of the service leader is not to get hung up on design details but to discuss their needs and how the the management team and other stakeholders will use the dashboard. Once the requirements are communicated, request an initial wireframe design. This could be reviewed to ensure the proposed design meets initial specifications.
Step 3: Engage Peers to Access and Integrate Data.
To produce a connected view, it is likely that data from a wide number of systems will be required. Integrating the data from these systems can be a significant challenge, and service leaders must understand and be proactive in supporting their analysts to solve this problem. For example, leaders might need to engage peers in other departments to gain access to data.
To solve the integration challenge, most organizations will build their dashboard using business intelligence (BI) platforms. BI platforms provide basic data-modeling along with the necessary functionality for designing and publishing dashboards. They also have relatively low skill requirements and are widely available within most organizations.
Step 4: Design Build and Integrate - Treat It Like a Product.
Once the dashboard has been designed, leaders should treat this initial version as a minimum viable product, using it in management team meetings for a few months to drive adoption. They should work proactively to provide feedback to the analysts to iterate on the design and prioritize improvements. Over time, the dashboard should evolve to meet current priorities, with the analytics team using a product-based approach to the ongoing design.
If customer service and support leaders can follow these steps to optimize their service management dashboards, it will help key stakeholders better understand their performance, leading to clearer lines of communication and a better demonstration of the value of the service function overall.
Daniel O'Sullivan is a director analyst in Gartner's Customer Service & Support Practice.