4 Essential Steps to Create Actionable Contact Center Dashboards

By Matthew Storm, USAN’s CX Evangelist

In today’s fast-paced world, the success of a contact center hinges on dynamic insights from intuitive dashboards, not just static reports. These dashboards are catalysts for transformation, offering actionable insights at your fingertips.

Before diving into the four essential steps, remember that consolidating your data within a flexible solution is key. A unified data source enhances accuracy and minimizes the confusion often caused by disparate data sources.

Enhance your customer experience (CX) transformation with these 4 essential steps to create actionable contact center dashboards:

1. Define Data with Purpose

Navigating through vast amounts of information from customer service platforms, management systems, and HR software can be overwhelming. Start with high-level insights that serve specific business purposes, such as:

Financial Performance
Agent Utilization
Customer Satisfaction

These topline metrics guide you to dig deeper without feeling overwhelmed. You can click through to see more details as you need to get more granular.

Pro tip: Make navigation simple by using clear, intentional labels for each section of your dashboard. Avoid generic titles like “Speech Topics.” Instead, use names like “Customer Retention Triggers” or “Agent Frustration Themes” to quickly uncover insights.

2. Use Data to Drive Action

Data should tell a story, helping the audience understand its importance, meaning, and how it can be applied to drive outcomes. Key aspects include:

Defining success metrics (e.g., Average Handle Time (AHT), First Contact Resolution (FCR))
Setting visual goal lines on dashboards
Displaying trends and goals clearly

This approach ensures anyone, even those unfamiliar with the contact center, can understand both the trend and the target.

3. Turn Data into Dollars

Clarity drives innovation. Infuse your dashboards with financial language to transform metrics into tangible impacts. For example, instead of just reporting FCR levels, show what those numbers mean in dollars.

Align improvements with financial impacts
Include costs associated with FCR, self-service, cost-per-call, etc.
Present financial data to save time on impact calculations
By clearly showing the financial impact, you streamline decision-making and drive more informed actions.

Adding financial data to your dashboard will also help the viewer (agent, supervisor, executive) skip the step of calculating this impact in dollars and cents on the side. This step may require you to find costs associated with things like FCR, self-service, cost-per-call, cost-per-dial, revenue per call, and customer lifetime value, but it will allow you to show direct business impact.

4. Prioritize Pain Points with Data

Aligning data with organizational goals empowers IT, operations teams, and frontline agents to drive meaningful change. A compelling dashboard should guide your journey towards an exceptional customer experience by:

Setting innovation budgets
Spearheading coaching initiatives
Helping teams understand how to best prioritize initiatives
Effective data use means spending less time on ineffective tasks and more on impactful actions.

Unlock the Full Potential of Your Data

Not all dashboards will look the same for every user or contact center. If your current dashboards aren’t serving their purpose, consider using USAN Realm for Amazon Connect. Powered by Amazon QuickSight, it allows users to craft custom visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and access deeper insights with ease.