I know I've gone on about this before - but I'm continually amazed at how much a few dashboards in our CRM system expotentionally add value.

Here is an example - last week the person in charge of support cases (Alex) put together the dashboard you see below.  As you can imagine, we are pretty heavy users of CRM and do all of our support case tracking in the system, it is a little customized and ties back into billing - but that is for another post.  At any rate, we get a ton of data in the system as far as which customers they are for - what the case was about - who it got assigned to - dates opened and closed....ect.  We've set it up so things don't fall through the cracks and we have happy customers 🙂 But now as an executive that doesn't manage this area, I could go in and run advanced finds and get at the raw data - yuck - adds no value to me unless I want to drop it into a spreadsheet and do some analysis - takes time that I don't really have.

So as long as the advanced finds are already built why not look at the data graphically - much more interesting and I can pull it up at anytime and get a feel for the support case world at PowerObjects.  One graph shows me the active and resolved cases by consultant in the last 90 days - now I know who has support tickets infront of them and who is taking on the most.  One shows me support tickets over the last 30 days and how many days they took to close - now i know how fats we are getting our customers resolutions.  Another shows me the Average number of days to close by consultant - now I know which consultants knock them out and how fast they do it.  The cool pie chart shows me how many tickets each customer has opened in the last 30 days - gives me a good place to look for training opportunities.  And my all time favorite - Billed hours generated by support tickets - no longer do I need to analyze invoices to see what the impact is on revenue from the support we provide.

Dashboard