Wait, delivering exceptional customer experience with customer-facing analytics? Yes, you read that right.
As the CTO, engineering lead, or project manager of a growing company, your job is to create and deliver value on the technical side of things. Customer experience is part of that.
Customer experience encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering. Naturally, this includes the software end. And depending on your company’s values and goals, you might be getting — or eventually get — some pressure to pursue it.
To deliver great value from your software, consider customer experience as part of your process.
Here are four ways you can start doing that now.
4 Ways You Can Use Customer-Facing Analytics to Provide Exceptional Customer Experience
1. Show Only Relevant and Interesting Data
You probably already know that you want to show your customer relevant data, but how do you do that in a way that's interesting and useful?
Try not to bombard users with an explosion of data on their screens. A good dashboard makes information accessible without it being overwhelming.
But here comes the tricky part: how do you know which data is interesting or relevant to a particular customer?
This may be something that your CSM can help you with, but a good rule of thumb is to make sure your dashboard is customizable so that it has different view options. Show your customers significant data upfront. Next, give them the ability to make the data as straightforward or complex as they want it.
A good example of this is Worksmith’s dashboard.
Worksmith’s dashboard begins by focusing only on the important stuff. But some options allow experienced users to expand on what they can see to suit their needs and preferences.
2. Present Data in an Easy-to-View Dashboard
Usability is a crucial aspect of customer-facing analytics.
There are many ways to interpret ease-of-use when it comes to dashboards. There are some universal rules you can follow to make life easier for both your customers and your developers.
Let's have a look at curbFlow’s dashboard:
Notice how the clean design of curbFlow’s dashboard allows the complex graph to be easily understood and digested.
A good rule for presenting charts and stats through a dashboard is to make it so that the customer can see it on one screen or page without dragging a sidebar or zooming out the page.
This dashboard does it beautifully.
3. Allow Customizability for Your Dashboards
We touched on this already but let’s dig a little deeper.
A great customizability feature is giving customers the ability to manipulate data directly from the dashboard.
Allowing your users to select different parameters, filters, and timeframes can give them the flexibility to find the data and insights they want and present it the way they need.
MedMe’s dashboards are a good example of this:
More than just an overview, MedMe's dashboard allows its users to drill down into different segments of data. It uses color to add an axis to the data while still keeping it visible on a single page.
4. Learn from Your Customer's Reactions to the Data (and Use It to Find Ways to Improve Customer Experience)
Your experience as a CTO, engineering lead, or project manager likely taught you that developing and cultivating great software value is never a one-time strategy but a continuous one. The same holds for exceptional customer experience.
This is the typical cycle of iteration — you learn from your system implementation as it happens, and then you use those learnings to develop new ways to make each step better.
A solid tactic here is to measure and monitor the data that your customers frequently view, access, or share across apps or platforms for customer-facing analytics. You can then use this knowledge to revise your strategies, potentially adding more value to the experience.
Tydo's dashboards deal with complex data. But owing to careful research, Tydo knows which data to focus on, including how to make complex data less complicated for the end-user.
Should You Build or Buy a Solution?
Now you know some of the principles of designing a killer dashboard. So now comes the big question: should you build your dashboard or buy it?
There are pros and cons to each
But if you're a startup, you're probably thinking a lot about how you can achieve rapid growth.
Let’s start by discussing some of the disadvantages of building it yourself and buying it.
Challenges
The obvious disadvantage to buying a dashboard could be that this solution won't be something that you can call your own. You don't have control of the development. It's someone else’s design.
So you probably want a white-label dashboard solution: one that looks like your own — your branding, your data, your choices.
A clear disadvantage to building a dashboard for customer-facing analytics is that it spreads you and your team out — it sucks up your bandwidth. As a startup, is this something you can afford?
Advantages
Now, we skip to the good part.
Cost
Do you save more on costs when you buy?
Yes.
It's no secret that the software development process is as costly as it is complicated. And even after you finish the product, you still must devote time and money to maintaining and supporting it.
Buying relieves you of these stresses and then some. A ready-made, white-label dashboard gives you the best of both worlds — a customizable solution that satisfies your customers by being useful, reliable, and on-point while at the same time not adding load to your already highly-leveraged development team.
Risk
Building an analytics dashboard yourself puts you at risk of a negative customer experience if you can't deliver a seamless product. This can affect onboarding success, churn, and your NPS.
Buying a solution addresses much of this risk because you're adopting a proven solution for presenting customer-facing analytics that's well along its development path — one that has other successful use-cases that demonstrate features you or your customers need.
Time
Time is a resource that every one of us doesn’t have enough of. We can’t create it; we can only manage it.
As CTO, engineering lead, or project manager, you know how much time is spent on development, maintenance, and support for a product or software — time that needs to be devoted to whatever is most important for accelerating your company's growth.
Buying a dashboard solution for customer-facing analytics shifts a bandwidth constrictor away from you. You can devote your resources to other aspects of your company — product development, for example.
Buying benefits you from having one less thing to worry about. One business approach holds that it's best to make as few decisions as possible every day so that the quality of your decisions is higher. You to allocate your total mental capacity to the most significant decisions.
Buying aids you in this regard, freeing your mind from a whole series of decisions. It's a friction-reducer.
Closing Thoughts
If you need customer-facing analytics as part of your onboarding process or for the continuous use of your product, buying a white-label dashboard solution has a lot of advantages, especially for startups — and for any company that doesn't want to spend its precious developer time on scratch-building a solution.
Explo specializes in white-label dashboards. We not only make great CFA dashboards, but we do so with excellent customer experience in mind.
So, if you want to deliver exceptional customer experience with customer-facing analytics, reach out to us today for a free trial or to schedule a demo.
