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What makes a good customer experience dashboard? The folks over at Jericho Consulting recently gathered some observations they found in their online forum while in their development process.

Those findings were presented in a blog post this first week of February and boiled down to five general principles that tend to work well when completing such a project. First, the post says, it is important to note what call centers care about the most. This is not a universal answer, so developers of a dashboard can find out whether or not their clients want to know about, for instance, metrics that deal with average speed of an answer versus metrics that describe the activity of an automatic call distributor. Different organizations will have different needs; paying attention to those needs is key.

This means that developers can concentrate on metrics to help illuminate what is taking place within a business in real time. It also means that developers can focus on presenting various metrics throughout the “journey,” as the blog calls it, of an enterprise's operation. Perhaps customer retention, it notes, is more important to the end of a business's journey than the beginning. If that is the case, again it is important for software creators to take that information into account.

Some businesses may insist on splitting data by its function rather than its place in the journey of an enterprise. Although Jericho says it would hesitate to mark data only by its functions, it could be worthwhile to supplement those functions with information about where the data fits into the business lifecycle.

It is also necessary to determine which metrics show up in front of whom. This is certainly the case when metrics have targets associated with them. For instance, if managers want an average call handling time of two minutes, it may not be wise to show that target directly to customer service agents. Managers who enforce or encourage meeting that goal need to know it, but agents may get discouraged if they are forced to look at their call handling times as they relate to an industry standard.

Overall, the point of listening to clients bears repeating. Developers should listen to decision makers from multiple departments to get an idea of what works best for them. With all parts of a business weighing in, the end result dashboard can be functional as well as impressive.