Your CX Dashboard: in theory it collects data about the customer experience with your business’s digital face and displays that data so that you can track performance, movement, and retention. And that’s the information that lets you know how your relationship with your customers is developing—right?
The reality is that customer loyalty isn’t entirely measured that way. Put more bluntly: your CX dashboard doesn’t build loyalty. Your follow-through does; meaning the ways in which you actively engage with customers. How well does your business actually deliver what it promises? How promptly does it do so? How pleasant are the interactions customers have with your business or brand at every level, every time?
Follow-through involves more than your CX dashboard may be able to measure. Let’s look at some other options based on real experience with customer engagement and B2C customer service.
Executive Summary:
- CX dashboards are digital tools that collect and display data related to the customer experience with your business.
- The data populated on a CX dashboard often includes sales data, contact data and tracing, dollar amount per sale, and repeat/return business data.
- While that data is important, the pieces of the process that really build customer loyalty often don’t appear on the CX dashboard.
- Loyalty grows out of good follow-through, meaning how well a business fulfills its promises for services and products.
- There are things we can do to track and measure follow-through—and then incorporate that data into a CX dashboard.
- By doing so we can foster customer loyalty, repeat business, and a positive brand reputation for your business.
- This is especially important for franchisors or owners of multi-location businesses, who must ensure quality across locations and the health of the parent brand.
What a CX Dashboard is, What it Does . . . and What it Doesn’t Do
CX dashboards have moved past “all the rage” and into “business necessity,” and with good reason. In the 21st-century business environment, data is king, and thus the ability to gather, track, and analyze data is a critical component in the success of any business or brand. Let’s take a quick look at what a CX dashboard is, what it does, and what its limits are. This will help us better understand what really matters in building customer loyalty and how we can make better overall use of CX dashboard data.
The Role of the CX Dashboard
The core goal of a CX dashboard is simple: unifying and organizing the data flow around the customer experience and customer movement through the proverbial funnel. Without a CX dashboard, customer experience data tends to remain compartmentalized, with different employees, departments, and divisions having a well-curated array of data that they understand internally but which they are unable to share with different sections of the company. CX dashboards ensure that everyone is sharing their data and that all the collected information is available in one place that’s accessible, easy to organize, and allows all involved to work together with shared, up-to-date info.
As with all data analysis tools, a CX dashboard is only as good as the data it has access to. And as is so often the case, customer experience dashboards are often limited in mapping the entire customer experience—including the parts that really built customer loyalty.
Data that Doesn’t Make the Dashboard
As a digital tool, CX dashboards very often focus on information that’s either innately digitized or easy to digitize: website visits, active members/customers, number of orders/sales, revenue per order/sale, overall revenue in a given time period, repurchase/returning customer rates. This is all useful and important data, and it’s a good thing for all of us that we have tools that let us collect, display, and generate reports based on it.
However, a whole lot of data that’s important to the customers themselves is very often left out of the CX dashboard display. How frictionless is the fulfillment process, IE how quickly and easily do services or products reach the customer? What’s the customer service process like—is it easy to reach an associate who can help with issues, and are those issues resolved promptly? Are offices and storefronts—if applicable—clean and welcoming for customers and clients? How pleasant is the overall customer experience with the company before, during, and after the sale is made? The importance of this information is quantifiable; an exhaustive 2026 report on the future of the restaurant business details the ways that customer loyalty is driven by data that won’t appear on a CX dashboard-generated report.
What Really Drives Customer Loyalty
These are the factors that really build customer loyalty and ensure repeat business over the medium and long term. They can also be difficult to quantify, which is precisely why they don’t always end up enumerated on a CX dashboard. There’s something we can do about that, however, by building on the experienced, tested approaches we’ve established with other businesses.
How Follow-Through Fosters Loyalty—and Return Business
Take a moment and re-read the examples of data that doesn’t make the dashboard, and you may notice a common denominator: follow-through. There are a lot of ways to phrase this, some of which are more ornate than others, but it all comes down to “how well does your business deliver a good experience at every step of the process?” There are a couple of tested approaches for building follow-through checks into your CX data set, so let’s look at a few of those:
- Gather feedback throughout the process: There are a number of ways to do this—a simple check-in email from a human customer service agent goes a long way. Automated processes like short surveys can also help. Both types of check-in need to be executed in a timely manner so that the experience is fresh in the customers’ minds and they can see that your business cares about the interaction and their overall satisfaction with the process.
- Track long-term customer satisfaction: This looks a lot like the previous step, and with good reason—one is the long-term version of the other. How much later you follow up depends on the nature of your business and the services or products you provide, but a 30-day, 90-day, six-month, or one-year follow-up—or a combination of the above—allows you to address any questions or issues while also showing that you care. It’s an important kind of follow-through in that it builds rapport and loyalty while also soliciting feedback and showing a commitment to good customer service.
- Ensure that customer-occupied spaces are clean and welcoming: This includes both digital and physical spaces. Websites and apps should be attractive, fresh-looking, and easy to navigate with regularly updated and refreshed information. Physical offices, storefronts, and the like should be tastefully decorated, on-brand, clean, and welcoming. It doesn’t hurt to ask about customer experiences in all of these spaces during your followup contacts either.
- Test your own processes: there are a number of ways to do this, including secret shoppers for both storefront/office-based business or digital sales platforms, regular owner/manager inspections of the process, and third-party evaluation services. This is especially important for franchisors, who need to ensure that their franchisees are protecting the parent business and brand. It’s likely going to be most effective to use these tools in combination to regularly test and evaluate your business’s customer experience and then—most importantly—interpret the results honestly and act on them accordingly.
- Remember: follow-through means following through! This may sound self-evident, but hear us out: follow-through means ensuring that your business delivers in an accurate and timely way. Orders need to ship promptly with delivery tracking attached. Services should be provided on time and as scheduled. Both should provide everything stated in the sales order and, when possible, go above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction.
Loyalty is an emotional state, and fostering that feeling requires ensuring that the customer experience is a positive one all the way through the funnel. While emotions are difficult to quantify, it’s not impossible to do so, and the approaches we outline above should give you a good start on doing just that. And by incorporating the data you’ve gathered into your CX dashboard, you’ll ensure that you’re filling in some of the gaps that often appear in dashboard-style tools and thereby ensure that your entire team has better data, better data sharing, and can thus make better decisions for your business as a whole.
Customer Loyalty is an Ongoing Process
There’s no end goal or end date for customer loyalty. It’s something that we as business owners build over time, with every customer in every interaction. Your CX dashboard doesn’t build loyalty—it’s a tool for measuring the factors that do. By ensuring that you’ve built excellent follow-through and quality checks into every stage of the process, your business can foster customer loyalty, an outstanding brand reputation, and reap the benefits of the repeat business and new customers that these things create.
Contact us at the Mershimer Group to protect your business and franchise income, improve compliance systems, and build a stronger, more profitable franchise network.