Take a Deep Dive with Verb on the 3 Key Factors to Consider While Mapping Your Customer Dashboard Journey for 2023.
…………………………………………………………………………………
With 2023 knocking at the door, businesses are once again going back to the drawing board. As a B2B Saas company, one of the most critical areas of decision-making for you is providing exceptional data experience for your customers.
The secret to improved customer satisfaction lies in helping them make the most of your product. A key way to do this is through holistic analytics – automated infrastructure through interactive data visualization – that spurs intelligent, timely actions.
Like you, we at Verb are always looking to surpass our previous benchmarks. As a no-code dashboard development provider for B2B Saas products, we also make it a priority to stay several paces ahead of the current industry offering at all times. In the coming year, for example, we plan to further build upon our core principles to give our product new superpowers. We are all set to endow our product with enhanced capabilities like:
- Improvements in usability, flexibility, and customizability,
- Add-on features for improved ad hoc analytics in real-time, and
- Enhanced governance frameworks to cater to evolving compliance needs.
So that was our 2023 vision, in a nutshell. What about you?
What do you plan to do differently in the coming year to make your SaaS product irresistible for your customers?
In this blog, we walk you through a roadmap for the upcoming year. Specifically, we focus on the 3 key factors to consider when making your customer data dashboards win the race for you. Whether you are already deploying customer data dashboards or not, this blog will help you make informed decisions on the most crucial aspects of customer data dashboards.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
#1 Customer Dashboard – Build or Buy?
Hint: Do More With Less
As a SaaS company, you probably already have an army of developers at your disposal. Hence, it is easy to feel tempted to take on the added burden of developing customer dashboards. But the “build vs. buy” argument is one that needs to be looked at holistically before jumping the gun.
For starters, it would be folly to underestimate the engineering time and effort that your core product requires. Developing, hosting, maintaining, and upgrading customer data dashboards over and above your core SaaS product can easily siphon your resources.
So first off, ask yourself this – is the diversion of energy, time, and resources worth it? Is there a better way to create professional and impactful dashboards without compromising on your flagship product? Where and how is your engineering time better spent?
Secondly, it helps to keep in mind that customer data dashboards are an entirely different ballgame. The expertise required to build and maintain them may not necessarily match the pool of software developers currently on your payroll. On the contrary, doing so may end up causing more harm than good.
Now, that does not mean that your developers are not up to the mark. Rather, it simply points to the fact that traditional BI and customer-facing analytics don’t use the same skill set.
Finally, as you consider building vs. buying customer data dashboards for 2023, think long and hard about where your potential providers stand vis-à-vis your requirements. Whether it is your in-house team, off-shore developers serving you on a contractual basis, or a ready-to-build dashboard development platform, ask yourself the following:
- Can your providers create 100% no-code data experiences for every user in your client organizations?
- Can they scale, grow, adapt, and evolve at the pace of your clients’ needs?
- Can they turn around the master dashboard for your customers in less than a week?
- Can they implement changes and new requests in a day or less?
- Will they hand-hold users in your client organization to remove any knowledge barriers?
When our clients finally understand and believe that with Verb, the answer to all the above questions is ‘yes’, the relief that spreads across their faces is a treat to watch.
Why should you settle for anything less?
#2 Investing in Customer Dashboard – How Much is Too Much?
Hint: Make Every Dollar Count
It’s amazing how much of the costs associated with customer dashboards remain hidden – opportunity costs and overheads, for example. If you’re not careful, these costs will remain hidden way too long, and you won’t realize a thing until your house is on fire.
This begs the question – how much is too much when it comes to investing in SaaS customer data dashboards?
No matter which provider, which platform, or which solution you are considering for 2023, it’s important to get your numbers right. Spare no detail. Crack down on your potential vendors with an iron hand and extract from them every estimate for every scenario that there is. That is step 1.
Step 2 is to unravel all hidden costs. For example, if Verb can turn around a customer dashboard in less than a week, and another provider can do so in a few months, what is the opportunity cost of choosing the other provider? Similarly, if a provider is not entirely no-code, and depends on engineering input by your/your clients’ team, what is the additional overhead cost to be incurred?
Continuing with the same example, if your customers were expecting a no-code data visualization solution, but instead have to run to the software development team for every little thing, what is the opportunity cost of the resultant customer dissatisfaction? How much will that cost become if that customer decides to leave you because of a poor data experience?
Be merciless when you consider these details. The only way to shield yourself from dashboard costs spinning out of control is to be ruthless with the facts at hand.
In step 3, put together everything you have learned in previous steps and see if you can assign a dollar value to your earnings or gains for every dollar that you spend. A solution that may look less expensive on the face of it, may turn out to be poor ROI-generating when the benefits it generates are considered.
Truth be told, investing in customer data dashboards is a complex case of risk-reward analysis for SaaS companies. But we at Verb have a simple mantra – if the benefits don’t outweigh the costs by a huge, HUGE margin, it’s probably not worth the risk.
#3 Data Experience – Standardized or Customized?
Hint: Hit the Sweet Spot
As we stand at the fag end of 2022, one thing is clearer than ever – customer data dashboards cannot be treated as a set-it-and-forget-it solution.
Having said that, customizing SaaS dashboards and powering them with ad hoc analytics is easier said than done. For one, most customizations are painstaking and seldom scalable at the outset. Two, ad hoc analytics require dashboard systems to be far more intelligent than just data-in-chart-out. They need to work hand-in-hand with users and tap into their reasoning process to mimic the same in everyday data operations.
To solve this puzzle, two schools of thought have emerged. One believes that the vast majority of analytics (~70-80%) can be standardized, the remaining require deep customization and ad hoc querying abilities. The other school believes exactly the opposite – that the lion’s share of dashboard analytics needs to be custom-built and ad hoc. The rest can be standardized using traditional visualization tools.
The problem is compounded by the fact that more often than not, users across different roles wish to cull out different metrics from the same data even when deciding on the same issue at hand. Should SaaS companies start with ad-hoc and then quickly standardize within a client company (or across client companies)? Or, is it better to start with a standardized solution and incorporate the flexibility of ad hoc at a later point in time?
Interestingly, ad-hoc is a Latin phrase that means “as the occasion requires.”
That’s exactly what we too stand for. The sweet spot between standardization and customization for your customers must be determined by you. It cannot be dictated to you by a vendor – not even Verb.
Hence, at Verb, we approach every B2B SaaS company with a clean slate. Instead of saying, “this is what we have”, we ask, “What do you need? What do your customers need? How will these needs change in the short term? How do things look in the long term?”
Put simply, by making the total cost of ownership our guiding principle, and putting your needs at the center of everything we do, we eliminate the need for rolling the dice in making critical dashboard-related decisions.
If you want a tour of our newest features get in touch!
