The Use of Dashboards in CRM
Running your business requires instant access to information so you can make informed decisions and take immediate action. But how do you stay on top of the competition if you can’t see how business is performing. One of the best ways to constantly monitor your business is by creating business dashboards for key performance indicators from within a Customer Relationship Management system.
A Dashboard provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process (e.g. sales, marketing, human resources, or production). The term dashboard originates from the automobile dashboard where drivers can monitor the major functions at a glance for example, how fast you’re going, how much fuel you have remaining and whether the engine is overheating. Dashboards do not need to provide every piece of information and typically limited to show summaries, key trends, comparisons, and exceptions. Well-designed business dashboards can provide a unique and powerful means to present and monitor business information.
A Performance Indicator or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is an industry jargon term for a type of Measure of Performance. KPIs are commonly used by an organization to evaluate its success or the success of a particular activity in which it is engaged. Sometimes success is defined in terms of making progress toward strategic goals, but often, success is simply the repeated achievement of some level of operational goal (for example, zero defects, 10/10 customer satisfaction, etc.). Accordingly, choosing the right KPIs is reliant upon having a good understanding of what is important to the organization. ‘What is important’ often depends on the department measuring the performance – the KPIs useful to a Finance Team will be quite different to the KPIs assigned to the sales force, for example. Because of the need to develop a good understanding of what is important, performance indicator selection is often closely associated with the use of various techniques to assess the present state of the business, and its key activities. These assessments often lead to the identification of potential improvements; and as a consequence, performance indicators are routinely associated with ‘performance improvement’ initiatives.
Business users often need to keep a real-time pulse on their customer data. This includes knowing what data changed, when it changed, and whether there are hotspots that need further investigation. Many common modern CRM systems like Microsoft CRM have dashboards built into the system to help you monitor important company metrics. By bringing relevant business data from right across the system, direct to users’ desktops helps keeps your business ahead of the game by delivering important information proactively. Some of the most commonly used dashboards in a CRM system are used for analysing sales, marketing and customer service metrics.
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