What's on my CX dashboard

One of the earliest recommendations I make on any company's path to higher focus on CX is this: measure the various dimensions of CX first.

The best place to start any form of transition is to establish a proper base-line to compare any progress to. For something as fluidly defined as CX, drawing a base-line is somewhat tricky. It must cover multiple customer touchpoints and even aspects of your company that customers may not directly experience (like your supply chain).

In my opinion, a successful CX dashboard has these characteristics:

With these in mind, the following are some "widgets" that I recommend for a CX dashboard (just in the order in which they occurred to me!)

CSAT by Touchpoint

Customers interact with various touchpoints and functions in your company, ranging from your website to your retail locations to your mobile apps, and even third-party marketplaces. Looking at CSAT scores at each touchpoint and studying those trends over a period of time indicates which touchpoints work well for your customers, and which ones need improvement. This is a good place to learn if your customers prefer a retail experience over inbound sales, or if they consistently like/dislike the quality of your support. A good area to dig deeper into would be study the volume increase/decrease of contact at each touchpoint as well. This can be segmented by business unit or territory and can serve decision-makers throughout the hierarchy.

Aspects Loved and Disliked

Customers say things while interacting with your company. They leave active signals like CSAT scores, but also leave a heck of a lot more passive signals in their conversations. With the use of AI, it is now possible to mine all your conversational data and identify the topics that customers talk about the most. While doing this, it's important to also understand the sentiment with which they discuss each of these topics. Customers may be unhappy about your pricing strategy, but might be very happy with the quality of your service. This section is intended to serve as a "broad strokes" indicator of what aspects of your CX your customers like and dislike. A good direction to go from there would be to observe the exact keywords. Another direction would be to drill down further into demographic details. This also can be segmented by business unit or territory and can serve decision-makers throughout the hierarchy. Personally, I expect AI to become a lot more accessible in the 2020s, and I anticipate that most brands (even small ones!) will do these deep analyses in the future.

B2C: CLV vs CSAT/NPS

I thought it would be good to include a B2C-specific idea in this list. I have only a limited amount of experience working with B2C brands at the ground level, so this recommendation comes from a desire to observe the broader health of the business. From my experience, a number of factors may drive customer loyalty, like pricing, convenience, breadth of offering(s), service, messaging, and so on. I've chosen to focus on "service" as the main variable here, but you can substitute it with any of those other factors as well. Studying CSAT/NPS vis-à-vis Customer Lifetime Value helps you understand the direct impact of service on the health of the business. I also recommend this on the dashboard to help change perceptions about service being a cost center. Leaders can drill this down further to look at it by any segment they want: country, category, gender, customer lifetime duration and so on.

B2B: Churn vs CSAT/NPS

This is a no-brainer for B2B brands. Nearly every B2B brand I've worked with has been obsessed about customer churn. When they have a favorable number, most brands wear it as their badge of honor. It plays a key role in seeking and receiving funding as well. Studying churn against CSAT provides a good indication of how much the quality of service impacts the customer base's decision to continue with the brand. Other variants of this could be to compare the value of renewed contracts and upgrade purchases. A brand might defy gravity if it has such irrefutable differentiation, but that is such a hard outlier.

Honestly, I could write about this topic for a lot longer. There is no single ideal dashboard, the best one is the one that serves your business the most. There's quite a bit of trial and error involved in identifying that balance. I intend for these recommendations to serve as starting points for your organization's CX dashboard, and hope that they set you off on a long evolutionary experience!

This is a response to Jeremy Watkin's #CXQOTD from here.

P.S. I've been meaning to write more long-form pieces, but June and July have been crazy months. I hope to write more in the rest of July!