Real Life Use Cases Of Dashboards With Actual ROI
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
We recently wrote an article about designing million-dollar dashboards. We wanted to take it one step further and give actual use cases we have developed for companies that they have used to in turn drive sales, reduce costs, and change strategy.
In our experience we have seen dashboards get developed, cost companies tens of thousands (if not more) to develop and maintain and never really get used. This can be due to a lack of actionability based on the dashboard, too many bells and whistles that often lead to analysis paralysis and general lack of clear direction.
When done well dashboards can have great ROI and help make better strategic decisions. Good dashboards take complex data and businesses processes and distill a clear message that allows the end-users to make decisions with confidence. Here are a few examples of dashboards we have implemented.
Fraud Detection
Fraud costs industries like banking, healthcare and insurance billions of dollars every year. Fraud is tricky to combat because often it’s not enough to just detect it, but due to lack of resources companies might need to prioritize which fraud to tack first. This is where developing dashboards that first allow end-users to have a high level of view before drilling is helpful. The high-level view allows the end-users to first see where the most valuable areas worth targeting are. Once a strategy is in place then the teams can start to drill down.
This ability to switch between high and low-level information is a key aspect. It helps the managers or directors see the problem areas and then assign a strategy that individual contributors can execute upon. This leads to getting back several times over what they paid for our work to develop the dashboard within the first 6 months! We say that, because…well..you would feel proud to if the product you developed was already proving to be very effective within months after developing it.
Sales Lead Generator
Many businesses only use dashboards internally. However, there are a lot of good reasons to use dashboards as sales tools. Either you can use them as a tool to help pitch your service or you can use them as a reason for a client to stick around. We have helped multiple companies in multiple industries develop dashboards using client data that helped close deals and keep clients.
This is because if you are offering a service, you can show how the service is impacting your client. Perhaps it could show how your service is benefiting them or where both of you could improve on your partnership. Having a dashboard that is clear and concise and tells a story that helps your clients gives them:
- Reason to sign you as a service
- A reason to keep you as a service.
Data can be used to create products that can be either given away as part of a service or sold as an add-on. Often, you don’t even need complex metrics. Instead, you just need to be able to answer the businesses most important questions.
Product Effectiveness Guide
Digital products like SaaS products, streaming companies and websites are effective businesses because they scale easily. However, just because your businesses seem to be doing well, does not mean it is. This is why it is important to have an operational dashboard that can help your executive team spot possible issues early and fix them at the source.
For example, when it comes to product development there are several themes of metrics. Adoption, retention, and engagement (there are a few others, but these are arguably the core). These three metric families combine can help tell a story about your product.
This is where our operational dashboard came in handy for one of our clients. We had created a high-level dashboard that allowed our clients the ability to see their adoption, retention and engagement rates from several different perspectives.
There is nothing fancy about these metrics. Adoption is essentially the count of users over time, retention is the number of users that stay, and engagement is how users use your product.
In our example, we essentially saw one major issue. Here is how you can think about it. Let’s say you are having a growing user base. That is great, month over month you are growing by 20%. That would be amazing, but what if at the same time your retention rate is 50% month over month. That means you are having to replace a massive amount of users every month to keep that growth rate. Eventually, you will run out of the target audience but keep the terrible retention rate.
This means your audience wants the product you are selling but when they get it, it’s not meeting their needs. You’ve got a great funnel or sales team, but there is nothing sticky about your product.
Our dashboard helped point this out and gave our clients the support they needed to reach out to their upper management and start improving their product.
Conclusion
Dashboards offer companies the opportunity to gain massive insights into key business areas. They help simplify and distill the complex business process into understandable numbers, they help point out problem areas and they provide confidence for action. We have had the pleasure of helping several businesses just this year have greater insights into their businesses and we have enjoyed those opportunities. If you are looking for help developing a better data strategy, dashboards, algorithms or other data-related topics. Let us know how we can help!
If you would prefer to read more about analytics, data science and data engineering then please read the below!
Hadoop Vs Relational Database
How Algorithms Can Become Unethical and Biased
Top 10 Business Intelligence (BI) Implementation Tips
5 Great Big Data Tools For The Future – From Hadoop To Cassandra
Creating 3D Printed WiFi Access QR Codes with Python
The Interview Study Guide For Data Engineers