Using Chatbots to make Dashboards more Powerful

KPI Dashboards offer organisations the chance to apply keen focus on those metrics which are critical. Having laser focus on the metrics that matter allow business to monitor current performance and build for future success.

In my experience, the process of building and defining the dashboard can in many ways be as beneficial for a business as actually having the dashboard itself as it:

1. Strips away unnecessary vanity or legacy metrics.
2. Encourages you to find metrics that bridge departments or functions.
3. Uncovers areas where you don’t have the data you want.
4. Reveals strengths that your organisation may take for granted.

I’ve used dashboards to help drive huge increases in success across teams and departments, and each iteration of these has helped me understand potential improvements and weaknesses in the process.

Dashboards Empower Organisations

By understanding the root reason I find dashboards so useful we can build on those functions to drive even greater success.

A common benefit organisations such as Power Systems Research, or Acuate cite is that dashboards “empower” them.

Unfortunately dashboards are generally either powered by completely magical “unseen” data sources and to some extent, I feel robs stakeholders of responsibility and ownership over the metrics being splashed across the screen.

Encourage Greater KPI Ownership at Employee Level

How though, can we build dashboards that enable any employee to share KPI’s with their teams or business without requiring complex data manipulation or custom API’s?

Step up chatbots again, allowing complex workflows and processes to be automated and streamlined — so here’s the plan:

1. Prompt employees/team-leads/management to provide relevant KPI’s at regular intervals.
2. Analyse that data to provide some sort of additional insight or benefit to the end-user.
3. Share that information both conversationally and through a business wide dashboard to all stakeholders.

So instead of weekly team meetings (easily delayed or missed) we can used Emma (a chatbot previously described here) to prompt team leads or individual employees for significant KPI’s and then use API’s to send any significant conversational input up to a dashboard, which it updated instantly business-wide.

Dashing + Slack + Emma

We can do all of the above with a relatively simple stack as outlined below:

1. Dashing — available here, the team at Shopify have made their dashboard framework fully available and it’s both beautiful and flexible as well as supported by plenty of other dashboard enthusiasts.
2. Beep Boop — with the chatbot world still fairly fragmented BeepBoop provide a simple and free way to spin something in just a few minutes.
3. Slack — already baked into our business Slack serves as the interface for Emma

Results

The resulting framework we have gives us a way of providing all the benefits of a dashboard at organisational level in a beautiful, easy up build on way, as shown below.

In addition to this we encourage individual stakeholders to contribute to the dashboard where possible which helps create a culture of better ownership and, through it’s conversational interface, “demystifies” numbers, making them much more valuable, and actionable.

I’m excited to hear and learn more about how other people are using KPI focus to improve their business so feel free to post and discuss.

PS. in case you’re wondering you can use Request in your Chatbot function similar to the below snippet