Building the Customer Leg Dashboard

Chapter 7: Building the Customer Leg Dashboard

to track and steer the organization in ways that achieve the strategic aims they have set. They have deployed the scorecards, determined the goals and measures to be pursued, they lead the entire effort, so they have the ownership and responsibility for the dashboards. Enough said? Good!

Taking appropriate action:

Who, when and how

If management has ownership and responsibility for the customer dashboards, can you guess who needs to take the appropriate action when using the dashboards? You got it, it’s management, again. They are the decision makers or they are the ones ultimately held responsible for the decisions they delegate to empowered employees. Whether or not you choose to delegate is your call, based upon your company’s culture and environment. But there is no escaping the fact that management has to take the actions dic- tated by what they see in the customer dashboard.

Regarding whento take action, one good approach is to use control charting to provide you with the answers you seek as they were designed with this specific issue in mind. Now, we’re not going to go off on a long dissertation on how to do control charts, but we highly recommend you become familiar with them, if you aren’t already. Specifically learn how they are used — they can be a little tricky if you’re not careful — and the meaning of common and special cause variation. For more information on this topic, take a look at Six Sigma for Dummiesand do some research on Walter Shewhart and W.

Edwards Deming. These sources will give you all the help you need.

When it comes to the how to take action, that’s pretty simple. Get your people together with the data and information in hand and work it out with them. Make sure that you have the right people involved — subject matter experts, people affected by the decisions that are likely to be made, maybe even the customers that are affected — and hammer it out. After all, when we’re talking about customer dashboards, you’ll often be dealing with customer satisfaction issues. Woe be unto those who leave the customer out of the discussion!

We cannot stress this enough: Do not leave your customer out of the

process when making decisions and taking actions that will affect them. They are what the whole thing your working on is about, aren’t they? Why would you want to leave them out of it? Sure, it takes a little extra effort to get them involved, but you’ll find that rather than guessing at what they want and need (which means what you want and need to do), you’ll know what needs to be done.

Building the Customer Dashboard

When building your customer dashboards, you need to consider what information they should display. You want them to give you the information you need, when you need it. You want them to be easy to read and understand at a glance. You want them to be easy to use. Not asking much, are we? And — oh, by the way — can you get all this information onto just one page?

Keeping-it-simple-style dashboards (KISS)

At the very lowest end of your dashboard options are the home-grown and standard off-the-shelf software packages. These will be your least expensive alternative, but they will also have the lowest levels of options and connectiv- ity to your company’s databases and other information systems for auto- matic updating of your scorecards and dashboards.

For the do-it-yourselfers that want to go with the bare-bones, no frills approach, you have the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel software. The beauty of Excel it is that you most likely already have it on your computers and people in your organization use it every day. It’s probably on your computer, right now.

When getting started with your scorecards and dashboards, this is probably where you want to start learning and gaining your experience — at the low end, using these less expensive options. After you’ve gotten some knowledge about running your manual dashboards, you will be in a far better position to start looking around for some more advanced ways to create and run your dashboards. Then again, you may just find that what you already have works just fine and stick with it.

The fundamental purpose of a dashboard is to communicate. It is a visual tool designed to communicate your important business information. The visual techniques you use to communicate that information is one of the most critical elements of your dashboards. If you and your people cannot quickly and easily differentiate data and information, you have failed in designing a dashboard that successfully communicates that information.

When designing your dashboards, just ask these simple questions:

⻬Does my design enhance or inhibit visualization?

⻬Does it make it easier to read, or does it cloud the message behind a bunch of fancy presentation styles and a lot of useless bling, flash, fluff and confusing color schemes?

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After all, you’re not looking for dashboards that will win the prize for the use of the most colors and backgrounds or the greatest amount of graphic com- plexity. You’re looking for simple — repeat simple — and easy to read and use dashboards.

If you’re looking for prize-winning customer dashboards (or any dashboard, for that matter), follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau: Simplify, simplify, simplify! Keeping it simple will get you what you want: Dashboards that are effective by being easily read and understood. When you’re successful, you can see relationships and trends in your key business information and that makes it a whole lot easier to make sound business decisions.

The example in Figure 7-1 details a keep-it-simple style dashboard. Note that it keeps it to one page, doesn’t have a bunch of glitzy graphics and back- ground color schemes that detract one’s eyes from the key information, and it is easily read and understood.

High-end dashboards with all the fluff

There are some places where you want to have a whole lot of capability — and there are some places where it just gets in your way and becomes a distraction.

When it comes to your dashboards, high-end software and its capability may just get in your way.

There, we said it! Be very careful when you go looking for software for your dashboards. If you want easy-to-create and understand dashboards, stick with the low-end software. Quite honestly, they work just fine, and probably have more capability than you’ll ever need.

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Figure 7-1:

Basic KISS dashboard.

The whole key to your dashboards comes down to two things:

⻬Presenting the data and information you need with ease

⻬Presenting that data and information in a visual way that makes it easy to read and understand

You want to be able to quickly focus on the message being presented and you don’t want to have to go looking and searching through a bunch of fancy, fluff-filled graphs and charts that detract you. 3D bar charts, with all sorts of shading effects, cone charts, and all the other options that you will have at your fingertips will distract the reader’s eyes from the main message: the information you’re presented with and the analysis of that information. Sure, they look nice and you can wow people with your ability to make very pretty and colorful charts and graphs, but in the end, it all detracts from what you want and need in your dashboards.

Resisting the temptation to go with higher-end dashboard software, and all the glitzy things they can do, may be tough. Some people in your organization may push you hard to use them. The recommendation is for you to resist that temptation and get yourself prepared to explain why it isn’t a good idea to go with the glitz. If you want effective dashboards, stick with the keep-it- simple style dashboards and the software that will provide it for you.

Just one word of advice. Okay, maybe two or three:

⻬When looking at your dashboard options and making your decisions about which ones to use, you may feel a little like you’re in the market for a new car, so be prepared.

⻬Know what you need from your dashboards, find those dashboard providers that have what you need, and then look around. Compare options and prices. Take them for a test drive.

⻬Steel yourself against any possible high-pressure sales tactics, and make your choice wisely. You may even have to convince some of your own people that the high end is not where you want to go.

In the end, you have to go with what works best for your and your organization.

Benchmark best practices in dashboards? Sure thing. It’s always a good idea to see what others are doing. But, don’t jump on a particular presentation or dashboard style just because it works for the XYZ Company or some other organization. Do what is best for you and the people you work with and for.

For more information on how to create effective dashboards, you might want to take a look at a book by Stephen Few,Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data(O’Reilly Media).

Figures 7-2 and 7-3 are some examples of more complex customer dashboards.

You will note that there are two examples: one using higher-end software and

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one — well, it shows an example of the sort of things you really want to avoid in your dashboards. Things like too many colors, too much confusion caused by fancy graphics. When looking at them, try to figure out what they are trying to tell you with a quick glance. Do you have to look at them and take some time to figure it out? If so, they are not what would be considered a good dashboard, even though the data and information maybe on point and accurate.

Just-in-time versus just-too-late dashboards

There are a couple of elements involved with just-in-time dashboards. The obvious one is how often you update the dashboard itself. You want your dashboards to be updated as often as necessary to give you the hands-on information that you need for measuring and monitoring your key indicators.

Depending on your business and your information needs, this could be anywhere from real-time updates, to once an hour, daily, weekly . . . whatever is needed for you and your organization. And again, the real power is how you use that information to not only monitor your organizational performance, but to make timely decisions. That’s where you gain a strong competitive edge: making timely decisions — and the right decisions!

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Figure 7-2:

Higher end dashboard.

The other element of just-in-time versus just-too-late dashboards is in the information itself. What we call lagging and leading indicators.

⻬Lagging indicatorsprovide performance, output or outcome information:

they are just too late for prevention of major problems and issues.

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Figure 7-3:

Dashboard to avoid with too much junk.

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⻬Leading indicatorsare used to predict future performance: they are just- in-time and help you to prevent problems and issues from becoming a major catastrophic event.

Both types of indicators are needed for your Balanced Scorecards and dashboards. Lagging indicators are used for holding people accountable, while leading indicators are used for internal management. For example, many financial performance measures are lagging indicators since they report past performance, or measure things that have already happened. Customer loy- alty and employee willingness to learn and change are more likely to be leading indicators. They often lead your customer measures for satisfaction and performance. These performance drivers may vary, depending on how you’re using them. For example, one company found that employee satisfaction was a leading indicator for customer satisfaction, which in turn was a leading indicator for their company’s profitability.

You need both types of indicators. But which type do you think is harder to develop and measure? Of course, it’s the leading indicators. That’s why they are often ignored. Well, just because they’re harder to come up with doesn’t give you a get-out-of-jail-free card for ignoring them. They are necessary if you want to stay ahead of the game and to be just-in-time with your business decisions. If you rely solely on lagging indicators, you will always be just-too- late with your decision making and you will always be placed into the no-win game of playing catch-up. No, we didn’t say playing ketchup, where you sprin- kle some tomato type substance all over the place (though playing ketchup may be fun as on off-site team building exercise, playing catch-up is not only very messy, it’s extremely painful and costly, too).

Another thing that drives your just-in-time versus just-too-late dashboard is how often they’re updated. For now, we’ll just say that you want them to be updated often enough to make sure you can take timely action when things go wrong.

This is especially true at the tactical levels. Get your information updates at the tactical levels right, and you’ll avoid problems at the operational and strategic level dashboards. If you have just too late tactical level dashboards, you’ll have nothing but trouble at the operational and strategic levels.

Tracking and Analyzing the Customer Dashboard

When it comes to your tracking and analysis of your customer dashboard, don’t put it off until the elusive time for it comes around the bend. When it comes to dashboards, there’s no time like now.

Diligence is the name of the game when it comes to tracking and analyzing your customer dashboard — or any other dashboard, for that matter. If you put it off and procrastinate, you’re well on your way to a lot of very serious problems. It’s something you have to stay on top of. Just like riding a horse, you have to stay in the saddle, or you won’t get anywhere and the old horse will just go wherever it wants.

Once you get your customer dashboard set up, you then have to figure out who is going to use them and keep them up to date. You will also need to understand how your dashboards at the strategic, operational and tactical levels integrate and what day-to-day processes they link to. If you don’t’

understand the integration and linkages, there is no way you will be able to drill down, or up, when problems occur. Without this drill-down capability, you lose one of the key aspects of the Balanced Scorecard and dashboards:

early warning signals of problems that will impact your overall functional and corporate performance before they become major issues.

Figuring out who needs to know

If you’re going make any mistakes in communicating your customer dashboards, it’s much better to err on the side of communicating more, rather than less. Just because someone isn’t responsible for updating or analyzing the dashboard and taking action, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t find value in knowing what’s going on. Especially when it comes to your customers.

Very often, companies treat employees like mushrooms. They are kept in the dark and fed a bunch of garbage. This is a very risky prospect when dealing with information about your customers. Employees need to know what their customers are thinking about your services and products. Employees need to know how the things they do, day in and day out, affect the customer and your organization’s ability to achieve what customers want. And it’s up to you to communicate that information and to make sure your employees understand how what they do impacts the customer.

Customer dashboards must be communicated to those who have decision- making responsibilities. Executives, managers, and supervisors who are responsible for making decisions must have customer dashboards for their respective functions:

⻬At the strategic level, executives need to see how the operational plans are helping to achieve their strategic goals for the customer scorecard. If everything at the operational and tactical levels are linked properly, with the right measures identified and all is well, the executives should snug as a bug in a rug because they should never see any issues or problems arising on their dashboards. How can that be said, you ask? Because the operational and tactical level scorecards and dashboards are the early warning signals for the strategic level scorecards and dashboards. When

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