How Business Leaders and Their Teams Can Benefit from Digital Dashboards
Analytics and insights have become increasingly important to every kind of business, not just Marketing and Advertising firms. According to the Harvard Business Review, “Cross-industry studies show that on average, less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions—and less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all.”
Often companies do monthly or quarterly data reports – but by then it may be too late. What if you had visibility to insights earlier and on demand? Both leadership and employee teams would be able to make smart decisions faster – rectifying problems before they happen. But how can you see the data in real time?
Enter Digital Dashboards
A digital dashboard can take all of the important information from traditional static reports and visually organize it into easy to understand statuses, trends and indicators. The first thing you will want to figure out is what type of data you want to track in real time, and why it’s important.
There are many different types of dashboards that measure everything from your customer service SLA’s, sales team goals and digital marketing campaigns. Different teams will have different needs, so we always recommend starting at a place that’s high-impact with your customers (where you probably are already collecting data), such as monitoring eCommerce sales or marketing communication outcomes.
For some examples of digital dashboards our team has built for ourselves and clients, check out our Digital Dashboard Case Study.
There are numerous benefits for using digital dashboards for your business:
1. Team Visibility
Integrating digital dashboards into digital signage on clearly visible TVs or monitors in your office makes sure they can always be seen and are at the forefront of your team’s mind. Team-wide visibility brings responsibility and ownership to what’s being tracked. When everyone can see the status of how everything is running, they feel empowered to make smart decisions to ensure success is met. By having dashboards easily visible in a common space, it also makes it so your team doesn’t feel forced to have to check the data, and can better use it as a tool for team conversations.
2. Available Anywhere
Not all team members are in the office – in fact your team may be set up remote or spread across many offices in different cities. Another benefit of digital dashboards are they’re available for anyone (who has permissions to view them) to see at any time of day, whenever they want. This means if your executive manager is traveling for a client meeting, he or she can still access the statistics needed at any time.
3. Time Savings
Digital dashboards eliminate the need to have your team pull static reports. While it’s still a good idea to formally meet about the metrics as a team, you can be sure that all of your statistics are up to date without having someone spend time manually pulling reports. As long as your teams take the time initially to set up the digital dashboards to connect all the inbound data sources and include the most important data they want to track, they will automatically update themselves as time progresses.
4. Stay on Track
Many team leaders and business executives spend countless hours creating plans for their teams to follow. In order to make sure the expectations of these plans are being met, your company needs to stay on track. Your digital dashboards can help you do this by automatically displaying goals from executive team plans against the real-time results. Constantly measuring performance and results helps everyone involved work towards improving it.
5. Alerts for Insights
Dashboards don’t just have to be top-level metrics or holistic insights to track. In fact, they’re the most powerful when they’re set up with a system of custom alerts to notify important team leaders when certain thresholds are met. Alerts can even be customized with detailed analysis and more detailed reports, allowing teams to quickly identify the root cause for the alert. Alerts allow for the ability to quickly identify either positive or negative swings in data which is essential to dashboard success.
Data is valuable to your company. Make sure you’re getting the most out of it by implementing and utilizing digital dashboards in order to maintain a competitive advantage.
Could your company benefit from setting up digital dashboards for your team? Let us help with that!