Ben Motteram is the Founder and Principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert. With 25+ years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he has helped many organisations to become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. Ben assists clients in areas such as CX strategy, Voice of the Customer, and employee engagement. In December 2018, Ben was the only Australian named on a list of global thought leaders to follow on Twitter and his blog has been independently recognized for its insight on all things CX.

Ben Motteram

This episode was Ben’s third guest appearance on the show. If you missed his previous Mini Masterclass episodes on CX Strategy and the Foundations of a Great CX Program, be sure to listen to those.

Check out Ben’s tips for creating a CX Dashboard in this article he wrote for CX Accelerator. It covers many of the same insights shared with listeners in this episode. I’d encourage you to explore the other insights and thought leadership on CX Accelerator, as well as Ben’s blog. Both resources are packed with all sorts of other great gems and CX thought leadership. 

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, please listen to the audio.

Welcome to Decoding the customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in.

If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the customer.

These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills and performance to stand out as a CX professional. And an added note to those who are already CCXPs, the customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcast Listing towards certification renewal credits.

So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to, so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 88, the second episode for the month of June 2020. And today, I’m featuring insights from a returning guest contributor, global thought leader, and Australian customer experience expert, Ben Motteram.

Ben is the founder and principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert. With over 25 years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he’s helped many organizations become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. His previous guest appearances on episodes 29 and 60 covered CX strategy and the foundations of a CX program.

Today, Ben shares his insight on building and utilizing a great customer experience dashboard. It was a topic request from me as Ben has done some excellent work in this space, and it builds nicely on the insights that he shared in episodes 29 and 60. A dashboard, after all, is about tracking and monitoring the progress of your CX strategy, and it’s a critically important tool for any CX program.

In this episode, Ben discusses the benefits and uses of a CX dashboard. He provides insights on how to build this with the end user in mind, including the types of metrics, the length, and the format. He also speaks about how to best distribute your dashboard once it’s up and running.

If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for expert guidance on why and how you should build a dashboard, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

Ben regularly shares his thoughts on all things related to customer experience, customer service, and employee engagement via his blog and on social media. So I’ll also include links to his blog and information about how to get in touch with Ben. Enjoy the show.

Thank you, Julia. It’s an honor to be back again today. Ever since you gave me today’s topic, I’ve been looking forward to talking about it.

So let’s get into it. So if you’re running a CX program, you need a way of communicating your progress to your superiors and the broader organization. All of us are guilty of not communicating enough sometimes.

So what’s required is something that will break down the walls of the CX department allowing everyone in the business to see how the organization is performing relative to customer expectations and the targets that the company has set for itself. This is both as a whole and within specific departments responsible for different parts of the customer journey. The instrument that many companies use to do this is a CX dashboard and these dashboards have many benefits.

Number one, they’re an easy to understand report card on your organization’s CX that enables readers to look at a variety of sources of information to gain a holistic understanding of how the company is performing. Number two, they facilitate organizational responsiveness because red flags or declining trends over time are easily picked out. Number three, they raise awareness about customer experience and engage employees in what you’re trying to achieve in the CX department by connecting achievement of CX outcomes to business success.

And finally, four, they help you as a CX manager, focus on the metrics that are most important. If you’re creating your company’s first CX dashboard, the first question you’re probably going to ask yourself is, okay, so what needs to be on it? But I actually think you should take a step back from there and ask yourself who will be reading it.

The information that goes on to your CX dashboard is going to be determined by who’s going to be consuming that information. Now, your executives are going to want headlines. They’re going to want your customer satisfaction or what some people call perception metrics, such as NPS, customer satisfaction, CSAT or customer effort score.

And these are normally shown overall and by journey stage. Your execs are also going to want to see key operational or what some people call descriptive metrics. And these are going to differ for every company.

But I’ll try and help you identify which ones you need to be tracking in a couple of minutes. Finally, they’re also going to want to see key outcome metrics which measure what action customers took as a result of their perceptions. These are the metrics that tie customer experience to organizational goals and can include things like sales figures, the number of complaints received, the number of positive online reviews that have been left, the number of demos requested if you own a car dealership, the number of test drives that have been requested.

So yeah, these are the actions that customers took. So that’s your executives. Other recipients of your dashboard may want the information broken down in more detail, for example, by customer journey stage, product type or customer segment, or they may want more than the headline metrics.

They may, for example, be the head of a department that is responsible for a specific part of the customer journey who wants to dive deeper in that particular area. Now how do you select which operational metrics you display on your dashboard? just as not every touch point is equal on a customer journey map, some touch points, most moments of truth, have a higher impact on customer perceptions than others.

Some metrics will measure things that have a higher impact on customer satisfaction than others. The key here is to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages. Now how you gain that understanding involves regression analysis on customer feedback data, which is well outside the realm of what we’re talking about today.

So I’m going to leave that for another day. The point I’m trying to make here is show the top one or two operational metrics that have the highest influence on customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages. When I was managing the CX Program for a large nationwide telecommunications company, I created a dashboard which had all of the headline metrics on the first page, which satisfied executives and 90% of the readers of the dashboard.

But I also had an additional four pages of data to satisfy the needs of the other 10% who wanted more granular detail. And I also added some commentary on the front page of the dashboard to provide context to the data both overall and by journey stage. So there you go, guys.

From having built one from scratch, that’s what made a good dashboard in my experience. The only other thing to consider when building a CX dashboard is how you’re going to distribute it, both the channels you use and how often you’re going to distribute it. Dashboard fatigue is definitely a thing, so you need to balance engaging employees in the company’s CX efforts with information overload.

At the telco I worked at, I produced my dashboard monthly and distributed it via e-mail to a group of senior stakeholders who then cascaded it to their teams. But CX dashboards can be integrated with other established dashboards, put on intranet pages, displayed on screens in the office, even printed and placed on a wall in the contact center. My advice is, do whatever you need to do to make it visible and keep it front of mind for everyone.

I hope that’s helped any of you who are creating your first CX dashboard. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn. I’ll be happy to answer them.

Thanks again for having me on the show, Julia. It is always a pleasure to be here. With that, I’ll hand back over to you.

That was special guest, Ben Motteram, taking us through the ins and outs of customer experience dashboards. Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode, for links to get in touch with Ben, and to find out more about his work. Many of the insights that he shared with us today are part of a blog post that he published late last year.

So, I’ll include a link to this article. Ben is very active on Twitter, so if you’re on that platform, he’s definitely one to follow. I’m a huge fan of social media as a means to connect to the global CX community.

If you and I aren’t already connected, let’s change that. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. My Twitter handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and Ben’s handle is at CXpert.

Thanks for listening. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show.

I’ll be back next Thursday, so be sure to tune in then or subscribe for updates when new episodes go live. I’ll see you next week.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including employee engagement, leadership alignment and CX strategy) or get in touch via email.