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 collect customer engagement data in one place, 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.

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.

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 engagement dashboard.

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.

Product usage metrics

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

Examples of product usage metrics to track:

• Product onboarding engagement rate: This is the percentage of new users who are actively engaged in the onboarding process.
• Product activation rate: The number of users who successfully 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.
• Time to Value: This metric measures the time it takes for new users to derive value from your product. The shorter the better.
• Customer engagement score: This is a key metric that measures how engaged your existing customers and free trial prospects are.
• Product 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 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 that score you a 9 or 10 are called promoters, and they’re the most likely to remain loyal.
• 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.

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 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.

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 a number of characteristics.

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.).

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.

Set up goals and track progress

Say goodbye to avoidable drop-offs along the user journey!

Userpilot allows you to set and track important milestones that new and existing users should cross. By analyzing the results, you can tell which customer segments are progressing and find why some might be stuck.

For instance, one of your goals could be adopting a specific feature in the onboarding process. Measuring the number of users that successfully adopt that feature can tell whether the onboarding is smooth. You can also identify users who dropped off before hitting the milestone and reach out to know why.

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.

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.

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.

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!