Ok, so your CEO just made a big statement about using “more customer insight” in business decisions.

You sigh, knowing that means you have more work to do.  

Or do you? The right customer success tool will give customer success managers (CSMs) and their teams insight and pertinent information in real-time.

A dashboard is the perfect tool to facilitate actionable customer success team goals. A well-crafted dashboard will allow a customer success (CS) team or individual CSM to:

• Focus as a team, or individually, on targeted objectives.
• Monitor real-time issues for immediate improvements, such as a bad customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating or an increasing number of trouble tickets after a software update.
• Motivate and celebrate employees for meeting goals, such as faster response times or resolved trouble tickets.

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What is a customer success dashboard?

In short, a customer success dashboard is a single view of all key CS metrics, visible to everyone in the organization.

The key point of a dashboard is seeing problems so you can act on them. When the CS team can easily see short-term goals and focus on vital metrics, customer pain points can quickly be righted. Overall adoption and performance with your products will be enhanced

Having a dashboard is the best way to align and share customer success objectives—which ultimately leads to more revenue.

Forrester’s research shows that surveyed customer-obsessed firms (subscription required) grew 2.5 times faster than non-obsessed ones and retained 2.2 times more customers per year.
Source: Forrester Research

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What problems or challenges can a dashboard help with?

1. Steady revenue flow: A dashboard yields a productive CS team. In turn, customers are more successful. Successful customers are satisfied customers, renewing their subscriptions, signing up for advanced services, and stabilizing your monthly revenue stream.

2. CSAT scores: When customers notice your attention to their needs, you earn their trust and positive reviews. Additionally, discovering and resolving friction points for a current customer benefits those who come after, resulting in a trickle-down effect of good scores.

3. Reputation: In a competitive market, paying attention to your customers’ successes will set you apart from the crowd. When current customers tout your name, you earn a stellar reputation and new customers.

4. Proving the value of CS inside the organization: Accenture research found that many CS leaders say it’s difficult to prove the value of CS within the organization. A dashboard with clear performance metrics makes that job a lot easier. 

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How to set up a dashboard for your customer success efforts

Setting up a dashboard is easy, especially when you pick an inclusive, intuitive CSM tool with which you can compile data from different sources within the same interface. Start by:

Picking limited and targeted metrics: Ask yourself the purpose of the information–who needs it and why. The data will vary based on the situation. Is it project-specific, or will an individual or team of people use it? For example, to motivate team members, you can use metrics like leaderboards to track and compare info such as CSAT scores and resolved tickets. The dashboard for the VP of CS, however, might show line graphs tracking and comparing trends.

Select appropriate data visualizations for metrics: Make trends and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) easy to spot. Some commonly used metrics include:

• Customer support tickets: When customers have what they need, there are fewer requests for customer support. If customers are having trouble and need customer support regularly, it’s an indicator that something is missing, be it features or education.
• Churn rates: Happy customers stay and use your products. Tracking churn rates helps you see if your strategies are working. Be careful with this one, though. As we’ll talk about later, churn rates take time to catch up to initiatives.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Successful customers stay and spend more on your services and offerings. Increasing CLVs likely means you’re doing the right things to keep customers happy.
• Monthly/Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR/ARR): Successful customers yield steady or increasing recurring revenues. They continue paying for monthly subscriptions to use your services.
• Net Promoter Scores (NPS): NPS scores are like taking temperature readings of your customers. Find out how happy your customers are by how likely they are to recommend you. Consistently seeking to understand NPS scores can help you constantly improve.
• Customer satisfaction: Learn how and what you’re doing well to know what to keep doing and what to improve.

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Pitfalls to avoid with CS dashboards

Recognize your audience’s priorities and concerns: Information overload clouds focus. Avoid gathering too much data by understanding the metrics that are meaningful to your audience and their purpose. For example, a CS team can’t affect marketing lead volumes, so they don’t need to see this data in a CS dashboard.

Display your dashboard for easy viewing and response times: It’s difficult to align a team toward company initiatives when they can’t see the goals. Quickly noticing and fixing customer pain points is the best way to improve customer success. Information can get lost or forgotten when emailed or displayed in a separate browser tab. A large screen in a central, visible location makes the best placement for a dashboard.

Avoid vanity metrics and lagging indicators: More data isn’t always better. Start with the basic information and adjust as necessary. Churn rates are one of those lagging indicators, meaning it may take a while for your new efforts and strategies to impact it. Using these indicators in conjunction with something more fixable, like CSAT and First Response Time, is better.

Focus on next steps, not just numbers: Metrics are powerful, but only if they are used to inform action. This is where the human side of things comes in. A number can tell you something–for instance, that churn rates are up in a given segment–but it’s up to you to figure out why that might be happening and then what to do about it. 

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Dashboards made easy

An inclusive and intuitive customer success tool like Catalyst can make dashboard-making easy. Any employee can create what they need with the data they need at any time from anywhere. All data can easily be compiled from different places like Salesforce, business intelligence (BI) tools, support tickets, and the data warehouse within a single interface without relying on Ops.