Customer Experience Tools
Explore more insights from Bain's 2020 Customer Experience Tools and Trends survey: Let No Tool Stand Alone.
Customer experience dashboards provide users with a consolidated view of customer data. Bringing together vital information from various sources, they offer relevant stakeholders at multiple levels within the organization a one-stop customer experience tool.
Customer Experience Tools and Trends
Our insights share how the right CX tools make customers’ lives richer and more fulfilling and strengthen a company’s economics by holding down costs and securing new revenue streams.
Often, companies rely on customer advocacy metrics to make customer experience decisions. While the “voice of the customer” plays a vital role, companies need to understand the full performance of their customer episodes in order to improve them. (An episode is an event or sequence of events experienced by a customer, from the emergence of a need to its fulfilment.) A customer experience dashboard allows companies to have a consolidated view of the customer experience at the episode level and across all episodes. A clear view of episode metrics—across customer, employee, operational and financial dimensions—can inform strategic and operational decisions that improve the customer experience and pinpoint areas for improvement.
The digital experience platform is a more sophisticated version of the customer experience dashboard. It unifies all the digital tools used at each episode, allowing companies to deliver a consistent connected experience to all customers. Indeed, at each episode, a customer can have a digital interaction with the company that may happen to be more or less efficient and seamless, with information poorly shared from an episode to another.
How companies use customer experience dashboards
- Deliver connected, seamless customer experiences.
- Gain greater visibility into episode performance across the organization.
- Set up a single repository of episode performance data.
- Make episode-based decisions and customer experience plans.
- Set clear accountabilities for customer episodes and key performance indicators.
- Improve service economics.
Key considerations
- Understand which audiences will benefit. Customer experience management involves many people in the organization, from the board and the CEO to the front line. As a result, dashboards can differ significantly for various stakeholders, depending on their needs.
- Define the right episode metrics. The choice of metrics depends on the nature of the particular episode and the intended audience. For episodes that are likely to create detractors, executives might focus on reducing their frequency and getting them right when they do happen.
- Define business value. Organizations need to clearly link customer experience metrics with business challenges, such as customer churn, and financial outcomes.
- Set a path to maturity. Every organization will have a unique path for its customer experience dashboard. Defining the point of departure and the desired point of arrival is a critical early step in designing the tool. Data availability, speed and coverage are key dimensions to consider.
- Provide the right enabling technology. The underlying technology must be able to integrate data from different sources, yet be dynamic enough to accommodate changes. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
- Continuously improve. As business and customer needs change, dashboards must be continuously refined to serve the targeted audience and enable sound decisions.