From data to insights: Step-by-step guide to creating customer service dashboards

One of the primary responsibilities of a customer support manager is monitoring your team’s performance and helping them deliver outstanding customer service efficiently. A customer service dashboard is the perfect tool for tracking your support team’s efficiency and knowing how happy your customers are with the support you offer.

You can add critical performance metrics to your support dashboard and make important decisions on balancing agent workload, prioritizing customer issues, and tracking issue resolutions.

This post will give you a quick overview of the different types of customer dashboards, discuss what’s included in customer service dashboards specifically, and explain how to create one.

What is a customer service dashboard?

A customer dashboard is a visual representation of any data that impacts customer experience, loyalty, or customer retention. You can plug different data sources into a customer dashboard and view key insights on critical metrics, KPIs, and trends in easily digestible formats like charts or graphs.

The information gathered from a customer dashboard will help you:

• Identify patterns and trends in issues faced by customers

• Understand changing customer expectations 

• Optimize internal processes and workflows

• Reallocate resources to handle customer queries better

• Extract daily, weekly, or monthly reports in a single click

Affan Khan, Senior Manager at Freshworks, finds customer dashboards like the support dashboard extremely valuable in measuring and leveling up his team of agents. 

Keeping a tab on service performance metrics helps me identify if additional training is required to upskill any team member. Looking at issue trends, we also recommend product enhancements to our product team. – Affan Khan, Senior Manager, Freshworks

Ultimately, the easy breakdown and visualization of data on intuitive customer dashboards help customer-facing teams improve customer satisfaction.

Types of customer dashboards

Customer service and customer success teams use different customer dashboards to understand metrics that matter to them. Here are a few examples of customer dashboards used commonly by growing businesses.

1. Customer service dashboards

Customer service dashboards provide real-time insights into the performance of support operations. They offer a holistic view of ticket volume, agent performance, and customer satisfaction metrics.

Help desk and ticketing dashboard

This dashboard focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of the help desk. Key metrics include ticket volume, average resolution time, first contact resolution rate, and ticket status.

Customer service team performance dashboard

Any dashboard that displays customer service metrics and KPIs related to customer support team performance, support tickets, or the quality of customer service is known as a customer service dashboard. Some examples of customer service dashboards include:

Help desk and ticketing dashboard

A ticketing dashboard gives you detailed information about the number of tickets created, resolved, unresolved, or even reopened during a specific time period. 

Ticket volume trends on the Freshdesk ticketing dashboard

Advanced help desk ticketing dashboards also give you insights on the tickets split by issue or channel type that’ll help you identify common customer queries or the support channel used prevalently by customers.

Customer service team performance dashboard

The support team performance or KPI dashboard provides insights on agent performance, either individually or as a team, measured and monitored against service level agreement-based (SLA-based) support metrics, including first call resolution, average first response time, or resolution time SLAs. 

Related resource : Top 15 customer service metrics you should be measuring

Call center dashboard

A real-time call center dashboard gives you visibility into call metrics such as average handle time, hold time, and average talk time, which will help you manage and improve your call center performance.

Help center analytics dashboard

Customer support teams commonly deploy a help center or knowledge base to encourage customer self-service. A help center dashboard that displays solution article views, feedback, and an overview of articles created, reviewed, or published can determine the usage and popularity of your help center at an article level.

2. Customer satisfaction dashboard

Customer satisfaction(CSAT) score is a popular metric tracked by several companies via CSAT surveys to measure how satisfied a customer is with the product, service, or support you offer. A customer satisfaction dashboard will help you view the trends in your customer satisfaction scores and survey response rates.

Related resource : A complete guide to measuring customer satisfaction

3. Customer experience dashboard

Does your organization use CX metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer advocacy or Customer Effort Score (CES) to track how effortless customer interactions are? A customer experience dashboard allows you to identify patterns and shifts in these metrics and CSAT scores. 

Customer experience dashboard example

The airline customer service dashboard, managed by the Department of Transportation (DOT) in the U.S., is an example of a simple dashboard that aggregates data from various airline carriers. It discusses airline commitments for families flying with young children and customers experiencing flight disruptions.

Related resource: What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?  

4. Customer success dashboards

Customer success managers or account executives use various customer success dashboards to monitor and manage account health at different customer lifecycle stages for different customer tiers and segments. This helps identify and control churn rates, improving customer retention. The dashboards also help gauge the probability that your customer will cancel an order or cancel the renewal of your product or service.

Now that you’ve seen common customer dashboards, let’s look at widgets and elements frequently used within a customer service dashboard.

What should a customer service dashboard include?

While managing a team of support agents, you may have to look at vital data daily to ensure your support operations are on track.

“We’ve set up customized, live dashboards on Freshdesk, and there are a few graphs and numbers that I look at every day to understand what’s going on in my team,” says Affan. 

Affan explains the different data that they constantly track as a team and have configured on their customer service dashboard. 

• Agent availability: Are there enough agents to handle the incoming customer queries during business hours on the different support channels offered? “Agents may have taken a day off or gone for a short break. However, at any point in time, there needs to be a minimum number of agents available to respond to incoming tickets, and knowing the number of available agents helps us route the tickets accordingly,” notes Affan.

• Agent workload: How many tickets are open and currently being worked on by each agent? How many complicated vs. easier issues are they working on? This data shows how loaded an agent is in terms of ticket volume as well as the issue type.  With this data, a supervisor or manager can redistribute the tickets to balance the workload among the team members.

• Negative CSAT scores: “Another metric we keep a close eye on is the negative CSAT scores. When we notice a negative customer satisfaction score on the customer service dashboard, the ticket is reassigned to a more experienced agent who reaches out to the respective customer immediately to know what went wrong and if there’s any possibility to improve the experience,” explains Affan. 

• Unresolved ticket queue: When you regularly monitor your ticket backlog, you can analyze and understand the exact root cause of why certain issues stay open longer rather than unreasonably pressurizing your agents. Maybe the issue was too complicated for a specific agent, or customer responses might have been delayed. You can then reassign the ticket to a more experienced representative or follow up with the customer to resolve the issue.

• Tracking these critical elements on customer service dashboards and having real-time notifications helps support managers have their fingers on the pulse of the customer service team.

How to create a customer support dashboard

Regardless of the type of customer service dashboard you’re building, here are the steps to create an insightful dashboard.

Step #1: Determine the objective of the dashboard

Which aspect of support do you want to analyze and find answers to specifically? Are you looking for insights on the agent or team performance? Do you want to measure customer satisfaction periodically? If you’re adding a new support channel, would you like to look at the trends in that particular channel?

Once you decide on the purpose and goal of the service dashboard, it becomes easier to identify the data sources and metrics to be added to it.

Step #2: Choose the customer service metrics and KPIs to be monitored

There are numerous customer service metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be monitored and displayed on the dashboard. You can narrow down the final list of key metrics that matter most to you for a particular customer support dashboard based on the dashboard's objective and your customer service goals.

Affan elaborates on how certain metrics were prioritized within the Freshdesk support team to be monitored closely.

“At Freshworks, our goal is to provide better customer experiences by giving faster resolutions with the least customer effort,” says Affan. Here are some metrics his team prioritizes.

• Resolution time: The average time taken to resolve a ticket, beginning from the first interaction to a complete resolution that is satisfactory to the customer.

• Customer Effort Score (CES): The effort taken by a customer to interact with your brand and get the issue resolved. The lower the CES score, the higher the customer satisfaction.

• Number of interactions within a ticket: Count of all agent responses and customer replies within a support ticket. A lower number of agent responses in issue closure indicates knowledgeable help extended in a minimal number of interactions, avoiding unnecessary back and forth with customers.

• Average Handle Time (AHT) is the amount of time agents spend on tickets both individually and as a group. This information helps you plan your staff and improve agent productivity.

At Freshworks, our goal is to provide better customer experiences by giving faster resolutions with the least customer effort. Being clear about our support goals helped us prioritize monitoring and managing metrics like resolution time over response times. – Affan Khan, Senior Manager, Freshworks

Related resource : The complete guide to defining customer service goals for your business

Step #3: Pick a visualization tool and template

There are plenty of visualization tools that help you create dashboards from pre-built templates or from scratch. Most of these dashboard-building tools have a drag-and-drop interface that’ll allow you to assemble the different sections of your dashboard. Popular data visualization tools, including Tableau and Power BI, offer integrations with customer service software to connect and display ticketing and support metrics.

However, a help desk software with robust, built-in analytics and dashboard capabilities gives you more granular and accurate insights on support and help desk performance. For instance, the Freshdesk analytics dashboard has various widgets, including ticket trends, customer satisfaction analytics, leaderboards, and scorecards, that can be customized and added to your customer service dashboard. 

You can set thresholds to metrics for breach alerts, pull curated help desk reports, share and export the data in a format of your choice—CSV, PDF, or API—and control your team’s access to the Freshdesk dashboard.

An omnichannel dashboard can help you get a comprehensive view of your entire help desk performance across different channels, including live chat, social media, and phone.

Step #4: Gather feedback and iterate 

Your customer service dashboards shouldn’t stay rigid and etched in stone. To know if you’re monitoring and managing the right data, reach out to your team and get their feedback on how the reports and data collected from the dashboard are helping them do their job better. Modify the data you pin on your dashboard according to changing customer expectations and industry trends to improve the customer service experience.

Take the plunge into creating actionable customer service dashboards

Customer service dashboards are a must-have in any customer service manager’s toolkit. Configuring and visualizing the metrics that align with your support goals helps you make data-informed decisions that enhance the overall customer experience delivered by your team. Once you’ve decided what you want to measure, monitor, and manage, visualization tools like the Freshdesk analytics dashboard make it extremely easy to bring your customer service dashboards to life.