Customer Engagement Dashboard: Which Metrics to Track and How to Create One

Customer Engagement Dashboard: Which Metrics to Track and How to Create One

A customer engagement dashboard is invaluable for interpreting customer data and making the right business decisions.

Having one will enable your team to collaborate more effectively. With ease, you’ll gather, analyze, and share user engagement insights that will reduce churn and drive product growth.

Read on to learn how to choose the right engagement metrics for your dashboard and how to build one code-free.

TL;DR

  • A customer engagement dashboard helps you create a visual representation of the collected customer engagement data, providing an instant overview of user interactions with your product.
  • Every company should have an engagement dashboard because it’s easy to interpret, enables efficient decision-making, and helps to retain more users. Detailed engagement dashboards allow sales and marketing teams, customer service, and product teams to collaborate seamlessly.

Types of user engagement metrics to track using the engagement dashboard are but are not limited to:

  1. Product usage metrics: product onboarding engagement rate, product activation rate, time to value, user engagement score, product stickiness, etc.
  2. Customer loyalty and support metrics: customer retention rate, net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, customer effort score, etc.
  3. Customer funnel metrics: cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, conversion rates, etc.

Three steps to building a customer engagement dashboard:

  • Set customer engagement goals: There is no one-size-fits-all in customer engagement. So, take some time to think about your most important goals and the results you want to drive.
  • Select key metrics to focus on: Knowing which metrics you need to track will come from your goal. If unsure, dig into your engagement data and interact with other teams in your company.
  • Build with a tool rather than from scratch: You’ll need different dashboards at different stages and will spend too many resources trying to customize dashboards from scratch. Choose no-code engagement tools instead.
  • User engagement dashboard tools to consider: Userpilot, Amplitude, and Mixpanel. Try Userpilot to create custom dashboards code-free.

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What is a customer engagement dashboard?

A customer engagement dashboard helps you collect customer engagement data in one place, providing an instant overview of user interactions with your product.

It also helps with data visualization and making data-driven changes to the customer journey.

Userpilot engagement dashboard.

Userpilot engagement dashboard.

Why do you need a customer engagement dashboard?

A user engagement dashboard comprises text, graphs, images, data points, etc., that summarize your engagement data over specific periods.

This makes it easy to interpret— you can simply pull out the information and immediately know how the company has been performing.

Engagement dashboards also enable you to make data-driven decisions. You can conduct experiments and check the engagement data to know if your hypothesis was right or not.

Access to user data also translates to increased productivity, as your team wouldn’t have to be second-guessing its steps.

Types of customer engagement metrics to track using the customer engagement dashboard

This section shows you a list of important metrics to track with your customer dashboards.

Before we get into it, it’s worth noting that the examples below are not universal. Your goals may be different and you may have different needs based on your customers. For instance, you might want to track customer experience metrics with a customer experience dashboard.

Product usage metrics

Product usage data helps you understand how and when customers interact with your product. By tracking the right metrics and key performance indicators, your team can see what features customers love the most, identify friction points, pinpoint improvement areas, etc.

Product usage dashboard in Userpilot

Product usage dashboard in Userpilot

Examples of product usage metrics to track:

  • User and company activity metrics and trends: The number of users who complete an essential action in the onboarding process. Ideally, this action is expected to deliver value to the users and motivate them to stick with your product.
  • User stickiness: Tells you the rate at which customers log in to use your platform. Product stickiness varies depending on how often the ideal user needs to use your tool—some products require more frequent visits than others.
  • Customer engagement data: Customer engagement score is a key metric that measures how engaged your existing customers and free trial prospects are.
  • Most popular features and pages: This shows you the most popular pages and features your different users are engaging with over a specific period.
  • User retention rate: This metric shows the percentage of weekly user retention.
  • Average session duration: This reports the average amount of time users spend on the product per session.

New user activation metrics

Tracking new user activation metrics helps businesses understand how effectively they are onboarding and engaging new users, which is crucial for improving user retention and overall product success.

New user activation dashboard in Userpilot

New user activation dashboard in Userpilot

Examples of new user activation metrics to track:

  • New sign-ups: The number of new users who register or sign up for your product or service within a specific time frame.
  • Activation rates: The percentage of new users who complete a specific action or reach a predefined milestone that indicates successful activation, such as completing their profile setup or making their first purchase.
  • Time to activation: The average duration it takes for new users to complete the activation process and begin actively using the product or service after signing up.

Core feature engagement metrics

Tracking core feature engagement metrics is essential for optimizing product performance and ensuring user satisfaction.

By monitoring how users interact with the key functionalities of your product, you gain insights into their preferences and behaviors. This information enables you to prioritize enhancements and updates to those core features, ultimately improving the overall user experience.

Additionally, understanding core feature engagement helps in reducing churn by identifying users who may be at risk of disengagement or abandonment.

Core feature engagement dashboard in Userpilot

Core feature engagement dashboard in Userpilot

Examples of feature engagement metrics to track:

  • Number of unique users: The count of distinct individuals who have interacted with a feature within a specified time frame.
  • User stickiness: A measure of how often users return to use a feature over a specific period.
  • Adoption rate: The percentage of users who have adopted (started using) a new feature out of the total user base.
  • Average usage: The average amount of time or frequency users spend using a feature.
  • Monthly/weekly and daily retention rates: The percentage of users who continue to use a feature over a specific time frame, typically measured on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis.

User retention metrics

Tracking user retention metrics is essential for assessing the long-term viability and success of a product or service. It helps businesses understand how effectively they are retaining users over time.

By monitoring retention rates, businesses can identify trends, patterns, and potential issues in user behavior, allowing them to make informed decisions to improve their product or service, enhance user experience, and ultimately drive sustainable growth.

User retention dashboard in Userpilot

User retention dashboard in Userpilot

Examples of user retention metrics to track:

  • Daily/weekly/monthly retention rates: Percentage of users who return to use the product/service daily/weekly/monthly.
  • Daily/weekly/monthly retention trends: The trend in retention rates over time, indicates whether retention is improving, declining, or remaining stable.

Customer loyalty and support metrics

Customer loyalty and support metrics help you see how loyal and satisfied your users are and how likely they are to make repeat purchases. Armed with this data, it becomes easier to prevent churn and improve the overall customer experience.

Examples of customer loyalty and support metrics:

  • Customer retention rate: Your retention rate is the percentage of existing users who continue using your product after a specific period.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is an 11-point scale that asks customers how likely they are to recommend you to friends. Customers who score you a 9 or 10 are called promoters, and they’re the most likely to remain loyal.
    NPS dashboard in Userpilot

    NPS dashboard in Userpilot

  • Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): This metric is similar to NPS but more short-term. CSAT surveys typically measure customer satisfaction after a meaningful interaction with a feature.
  • Customer effort score: This metric measures your product’s ease of use. It’s something you should constantly track to ensure your product remains intuitive.

Customer funnel metrics

Funnel metrics are useful for measuring the effectiveness of your funnels. Start tracking your funnel analytics to know why users drop off and how to prevent that.

Funnel analysis dashboard in Userpilot

Funnel analysis dashboard in Userpilot

Examples of customer funnel metrics:

  • Cost per acquisition: The cost incurred in pushing a lead down your sales funnel. Tracking this metric helps you test different acquisition strategies and see which works best.
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total money a customer spends with you throughout their use of your product. High retention means more CLV and increased revenue.
  • Conversion rates: This metric measures the total number of users that convert from freemium to premium or trial to paid, depending on your pricing model.

How to build a customer engagement dashboard?

So far, you’ve seen the importance of engagement dashboards and some key metrics to include. It’s time to build one for yourself.

Follow the step-by-step guide below:

Set SMART customer engagement goals

There is no one-size-fits-all in customer engagement. Each team has different goals based on where they are on the growth curve.

So, take some time to think about your most important goals and the results you want to drive.

If your goal is boosting customer loyalty, focus on improving NPS and personalizing customer experiences. If you want to increase the activation rate, you need to concentrate on proactive engagement and onboarding. The list goes on.

SMART goal-setting framework

Use SMART framework to set goals

Select key metrics to focus on

Knowing which metrics you need to track will come from your goal. If your objective falls under the categories considered in the previous section, simply check to see which of the metrics mentioned you should focus more on.

If you’re unsure what to prioritize, it might be best to dig into your engagement data and discuss it with other teams.

Build with a tool rather than from scratch

Building from scratch gives you control, but it’s more expensive: you’ll need different dashboards at different stages, and you’ll be spending too many resources if you try coding everything.

There are many product growth and digital adoption tools you can use instead. These platforms allow you to collect data and feedback in-app, act on data, automate in-app engagement, etc.

Customer engagement dashboard tools

The tools below are some of the best in the market. They require no coding and are easy to use:

Userpilot

Userpilot is a holistic product engagement platform with features to help you collect customer data, analyze user behavior, and segment users based on several characteristics.

Userpilot dashboard

Userpilot dashboard

 

Use feature tagging and see how customers engage with features

Feature tagging gives you granular insights into how users interact with your product.

All you have to do is use our Chrome extension to tag the feature(s) in question, and you’ll be able to see how customers are interacting with them (clicks, hovers, etc.).

feature-tagging-userpilot

Feature tagging with Userpilot.

Explore heatmaps per feature tagging

You can also use heatmaps to visualize how different user segments engage with your features. The heatmap will show all the features you’ve tagged and the density of interactions each one received.

The level of interaction is differentiated using colors—as in the image below—with red showing high interaction and blue indicating minimum engagement.

feature-heatmap-userpilot-customer-engagement-dashboard

Heatmaps provide extra insights to enrich your customer engagement dashboard.

Use analytics dashboards to track progress

With Userpilot, you can easily visualize customer data to monitor user engagement across the whole customer journey.

Use analytics dashboards to track customer data and engagement metrics

Use analytics dashboards to track customer data and engagement metrics

 

Soon you will be able to create custom dashboards with custom metrics. For instance, you will be able to create customer experience dashboards. Customer experience dashboard examples include the NPS dashboard, CSAT and CES dashboards, and customer sentiment analysis dashboard.

Build segments based on content engagement

Following the steps above will give you enough data to differentiate customers. You’ll begin to notice inactive users, regular users, and some highly engaged customers.

Properly segmenting your users based on their engagement level enables you to interact with them more contextually. You can send personalized messages to inactive users, create custom flows to increase the percentage of highly engaged users, etc.

Userpilot is a good tool for this. Our platform allows you to segment customers based on journey stage, feedback, engagement level, company data, and so on.

 

 

Advanced user segmentation in Userpilot.

Advanced user segmentation in Userpilot.

Create custom dashboards code-free in Userpilot!

 

Amplitude

Amplitude is a good tool for in-depth user engagement analysis.

The platform gives you a bird’s eye view of customer behavior and enables you to draw behavioral patterns that can be used to engage customers further.

But unlike Userpilot, Amplitude doesn’t have features for measuring CSAT and actively reducing churn.

Amplitude’s dashboard.

Amplitude’s dashboard.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel gives a holistic view of user engagement because it records customer interactions on your website and app.

You can use it to keep track of user navigation, button clicks, scrolling, feature engagement, etc. The platform also allows you to stay abreast of the health of individual accounts on your platform. That way, it’s easier to pinpoint inactive and at-risk users.

Mixpanel has advanced features for funnel analytics and proper user segmentation. You can easily identify friction in your engagement funnel and also segment users based on different metrics to provide more personalized experiences.

Both Amplitude and Mixpanel can seamlessly integrate with Userpilot, and this has many advantages.

For example, after Mixpanel identifies the friction areas in your funnel, you can create in-app experiences with Userpilot to help customers move more smoothly.

mixpanel-customer-engagement-dashboard

Mixpanel’s dashboard.

Conclusion

Product leaders are like caregivers: you have to keep checking on your customers to ensure they’re happy.

Having an engagement dashboard makes your job easier. You can see all the important data from one place, and you’re better equipped to make data-driven decisions.

Hopefully, this article has shown you important metrics to have in your dashboard, how to create one for yourself, and the best tools for it. Why don’t you get started immediately? Book a demo with our team to build your customer engagement dashboard completely code-free!

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