Self-service dashboards enables your internal teams to access databases and analyze data without needing help from engineers or data scientists.
That autonomy is a powerful lever for your employees, so imagine what self-service dashboards could do for your customers.
Enterprises often need a way for customers to access and use data independently. To do this, they use embedded dashboards for customer-facing applications like mobile apps and online portals.
When customers can find the data that answers their questions through embedded dashboards — without relying on IT support — it's a powerful value-add. UX and UI matter.
Let's look at the benefits of using self-service dashboards in customer-facing applications and how Explo can help you get started.
Why Enterprises Use Self-Service Dashboards
1. Provides Better Customer Experience (CX)
Embedded Dashboards Offer Quick and Easy Solutions to Customer Problems
Embedded dashboards offer easy access to data through one convenient app. Self-service dashboards take this one step further by letting customers:
- Ask questions in a way that makes sense to them
- Gain real-time insights where they’re needed
- Problem-solve without having to log into, navigate, and learn complex new tools
Users don’t have to search the web or reach out to customer support for answers. Anything a customer might need — information, data-analysis tools, etc. — is right at their fingertips.
Lets Customers Cut and Slice Data
Your customers want to see data that's relevant to them. Self-service dashboards lets users customize their dashboards to show the most useful data.
Customers view their data in as much detail as they want. They have complete access to all their data. But they can also choose to filter their results to focus on whatever is necessary.
Helps Customers Make Good Decisions
When customers use self-service dashboards, they can dive deeper into data reports and genuinely understand their data. Users can then make data-driven decisions.
Better Security with Self-Service Dashboards
Self-service dashboards boost security by limiting access to that data to a specific customer only.
Internally-facing embedded dashboards inherently trust the intentions and competencies of employees accessing sensitive data. Self-service dashboards have higher security requirements to protect your customers' sensitive data from bad actors.
2. Self-Service Dashboards Reaches and Retains Customers
Self-service dashboards helps your enterprise reach and retain more customers.
McKinsey has shown that being data-driven and leveraging analytics helps you:
- Acquire 23x more customers
- Retain 6x the number of new customers
The same study also showed enterprises that use customer analytics extensively beat their competitors by a wide margin — in sales, growth, ROI, and profitability.
3. Self-Service Dashboards Frees Up Support Bandwidth
Self-service dashboards in customer applications lets customers take control. With easy access to data, customers can find answers to their questions without contacting IT support.
Self-service dashboards frees up your IT staff to focus on other tasks.
Early Adopter Success with Self-Service Dashboards: US Bank
U.S. Bank's ScoreBoard App
U.S. bank turned to customer-facing analytics in 2010 when it introduced ScoreBoard — a self-service application that lets customers monitor their spending and compare it to revenue trends.
"We're adding industry data, so if you're, say, a restaurant owner in California and your sales are down this month or this quarter, you can use the Scoreboard to look at data on how other restaurants in California are doing and compare your performance."
—Robert Kaufman, former SVP of US Bank's Payments Services Division
U.S. Bank designed the ScoreBoard app using direct feedback from small business customers. The app featured simplified charts and gave users a monthly snapshot of their purchases and payments. The goal was to make complex financial information easy for users to understand.
The transition to using the ScoreBoard app was easy for customers because they didn’t have to create any new accounts. They could use their existing U.S. Bank accounts and log in through the app rather than via the Internet.
Outcome
ScoreBoard was first released in July of 2010. By October of that year, over 100,000 customers were using it.
U.S. Bank's Mobile App
Since then, U.S. Bank has updated and changed its app quite a bit. ScoreBoard is now known as the U.S. Bank mobile app.
On April 2, 2019, U.S. Bank revealed a completely updated version of the U.S. Bank mobile app. The app’s updated features and tools resulted from the U.S. Bank Mobile Money Management Survey. This survey found that customers wanted help managing their money and creating a budget, and they wanted to be able to do these tasks without spending a ton of time.
U.S. Bank listened to customers’ needs. Their new app makes banking helps customers with features, such as:
- A personalized dashboard that lets users analyze spending habits in real-time
- Added security features, like Face ID
- Easy banking and money transfers
Outcome
In 2021, industry benchmarking firm Keynova Group named U.S. Bank as both the top mobile app and #1 overall (mobile app + mobile web).
Explo's Self-Service Dashboards Use Cases
Together
Remote learning platforms rely on embedded self-service metrics to communicate efficiently with students (their clients) and educators (their internal stakeholders).
Nathan Goldstein, Head of Product at Together, which uses Explo's ed-tech platform, had this to say:
"Explo solves embedded analytics in a smart way. We've tried other vendors, and they are either too much work for engineering or don't easily allow any engineers to create specific queries that our customers want. The combination of the dashboard editor and SQL is perfect for developing quickly and to customer requirements."
Explo's dashboards help mentors and mentees track their progress, identify areas of improvement, and build development plans, with features like:
- Putting together custom reports to address specific needs
- Scaling up analytics for a growing number of users
MedMe Health
MedMe Health uses Explo to show pharmacy statistics about appointments and schedules and manage resources better. For example, the platform lets pharmacies see how many appointments there are — by type and status. This is important for understanding usage, efficiency, and revenue.
How Explo Can Help
Building your dashboard and implementing self-service dashboards from scratch takes a lot of time and energy. Instead, you can skip this months-long process and buy a white-label solution from Explo.
Why Choose Explo?
Explo is secure
Explo has a secure authorization feature that lets users authenticate with a magic email link. This saves users from having to manage and keep track of their passwords and is perfect for customer-facing analytics.
Explo is Customizable
As a white-label solution, Explo lets you match the style on your existing dashboards and applications. It's fully customizable and looks like your brand.
- Customize fonts, border styles, shadows, branding, and more
- Customize how you want to view your data
- Use interactive charts and graphs — slice data by different parameters
Explo Offers Easy Integration
Explo also makes it easy to integrate preexisting self-service systems. You can connect databases quickly and embed dashboards in minutes — without having to replicate data or create new data models.
Explo’s data integration saves everyone a lot of time.
- Your enterprise doesn’t have to build customized applications or maintain multiple platforms
- Customers don’t have to spend time learning new software
- Your data teams aren’t wasting time switching between different systems
- Instead, they can sign in, view, and interact with the dashboard and visualizations directly from multiple databases
Level Up Your Enterprise UX with Self-Service Dashboards
Explo can help your enterprise nail UX with customer-facing self-service dashboards using our white-label dashboards.
We have a proven track record of frictionless implementation, which means minimum downtime — an essential aspect of customer-facing tools.
Your customers won't accept downtime to access their data. You shouldn't either.
If you're looking to improve your enterprise UX with self-service dashboards, book a demo with us today.
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