Customer experience (CX) is sometimes treated as a one-team show.

Your frontline teams—usually the customer support and customer success teams, and maybe your sales team—are the ones who interact with customers directly, so they’re the main arbiters of customer experience. They’re seen as responsible for everything CX, beginning to end. Teams that don’t directly interact with customers are absolved from caring about the customer experience.

That’s a short-sighted perspective. It assumes that these teams are the only ones influencing your customer experience or are the only ones that should care about it. But that’s not the case.

Improving your core customer experience metrics has far-reaching implications for your business:

• 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
• 73% of buyers point to customer experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions.
• 65% of buyers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.

There’s a massive opportunity to improve customer experience and influence key business metrics (like retention) by involving everyone across your company. One of the best ways to make this happen is with a tool that you might already have in place: a customer experience dashboard.

5 ways to unlock the potential of your CX dashboard

A lot goes into building a great CX dashboard. It needs to display important KPIs, show a holistic view of your customer experience, and highlight the development of trends and patterns over time.

Creating a dashboard is easier when you have goals for how you want to use it. The best goal—the most impactful goal—is to build a customer experience dashboard that you can leverage across your entire company. Build the right CX dashboard and you can use it to:

1. Measure the success of your customer support and success teams.
2. Use customer feedback data to guide product development.
3. Find opportunities for marketing campaigns.
4. Align CX metrics with customer and business outcomes.
5. Use customer insights to develop your business strategy.

Measure the success of your customer support and success teams

Your frontline teams have a direct impact on your customer experience (brilliant insight, I know).

A good dashboard makes it possible for these teams to keep their finger on the pulse of how customers feel. That’s helpful, because those metrics are in many ways a reflection of their own performance.

By displaying CX metrics like CSAT, CES, or a quality score, you can:

• Get a snapshot of how your teams are doing.
• Provide specific and actionable feedback to individual agents.
• Use that feedback to create opportunities for development across the team.

Those development opportunities lead to better customer interactions, but they’re also how you keep your employees happy, motivated, and engaged. The famous saying “happy employees make happy customers” by and large holds true.

Using a CX dashboard effectively for customer success and support takes some work. It might mean improving the data literacy across the whole team, so they understand where the numbers are coming from and how they can influence them. It will probably involve some coaching about using the dashboard as a data point to help develop a broad and holistic CX strategy, rather than isolating specific KPIs.

Investing that time is worth it, though. You’ll have a more resilient, focused, and ambitious team that knows what they’re working towards. When your teams understand what success looks like—and how they influence it—they’ll be empowered to create the customer experience you’re hoping for.

Use customer feedback data to guide product development

A big part of building a strong CX team involves bridging the gap between the product team and the customer. Having that bridge is crucial, because the last thing you want is to spend time and money on things customers don’t care about.

Don’t settle for best guesses or rolling the dice—let your customer feedback guide your product development.

There’s power in sharing individual anecdotes, like sharing the story of that one customer whose entire usage of your product depended on this feature that’s completely broken. Stories give a voice to your customers and often help your product team empathize with them. But they’re typically still anecdotes.

There’s far more power in backing up anecdotes with real data, and a customer experience dashboard is the best way to do this.

Your CX dashboard can display an overview of how many customers are impacted by an issue, how these issues change over time, and maybe even snapshots of multiple customers who experienced the same issue. Combining those anecdotes with compelling data makes a huge difference.

Giving your product and engineering teams access to your CX dashboard is just the first step. You can then use customer insights to:

• Inform the product roadmap by developing features that customers care about most.
• Understand where customers experience blockers.
• Keep track of how successful releases are and whether product decisions are popular (or not).
• Prioritize bug fixes strategically.
• Develop a deeper understanding of how to influence product adoption and customer satisfaction.

Find opportunities for marketing campaigns

Did you know that 79% of people only engage with offers if they reflect their previous interactions with a company?

Your CX dashboard alone can’t bridge the gap between your customers and your marketing team, but it provides valuable insights that can be used to generate more effective marketing ideas.

Here are some examples:

• Trigger personalized marketing content when your customers start using a feature that leads to that “Aha” moment.
• Design campaigns around the features of your product that are most popular or helpful to new customers.
• Create blog or newsletter content shedding light on the lesser-known features of your product, increasing the value existing customers receive.
• Test different marketing campaigns based on customer segmentation and feedback.
• Uncover great success stories and novel use cases.

Being closer to your customers always brings unexpected opportunities. Content generated like this is much more likely to gain traction and engagement than something uninformed by customer experience, so it’s a win-win for both sides: your customers and your marketing team.

Align customer experience metrics with customer and business outcomes

CX metrics become more meaningful across your whole company when you understand how they impact your business.

Only 20% of companies model how CX metrics influence customer outcomes (like retention) or business outcomes (like revenue growth). Even if you don’t manage to connect these metrics causally, making your CX dashboard available to your board and your executive team enables them to—at least—understand how CX metrics correlate with business outcomes.

They'll likely notice patterns that should influence key business decisions.

For example, maybe sales and CSAT tend to go down during your slow season, so your sales and support teams can collaborate on improving both. Or maybe Customer Lifetime Value and NPS trend together closely, so you know investments that are likely to improve NPS are worthwhile.

Your customer experience dashboard is how you make those trends visible and build traction for CX initiatives.

Use customer insights to develop business strategy

Customer insights should play a huge role in defining your business strategy.

Making your CX dashboard available to the different teams in your company is great—but it’s useless if it doesn’t meaningfully influence your future decision-making. Taking action based on customer insights is how you set yourself apart from your competitors over time.

Your strategy and executive team can use a customer experience dashboard to:

• Identify customer needs and preferences.
• Understand what your customers are looking for and why.
• See which product decisions resonate with your customer base.
• Connect strategic decisions with the impact those choices had on your customers, such as the impact on NPS or customer loyalty.

Drive growth with your customer experience dashboard

Customer data is a resource. You can spend the next decade collecting it, but it’s useless if your data sits in a silo and doesn’t influence the choices you make.

To use your customer feedback to its fullest potential, it needs to be accessible and understandable. There’s no better way to do that then to create a customer experience dashboard that’s helpful across every team in your organization.

That’s where Kapiche comes in.

If you want to understand what your customers really want and how they feel—with minimal effort, even if you have a ton of data sources—then Kapiche is built for teams like you. Book a demo today!