Optimize Support and Serve Customers Better with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Support managers have the responsibility of tracking various data to ensure that all sectors in their company are running smoothly. Managers need to examine their data frequently in order to identify trends in customer satisfaction with support performance, enabling them to identify areas that need improvement in their team’s service and in the product or service their company offers. Embedded analytics allows them to embed a customer support monitoring dashboard in their everyday work application, which makes their duties simpler. Managers can track metrics and KPIs that inform them of the overall performance of their support teams with easily comprehensible visualizations. In this blog, I am going to provide a walkthrough of embedded analytics and how Bold BI will help enhance your customer support by exploring the following topics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in a support apps.
- Bold BI’s customer support monitoring dashboard example.
- How to embed Bold BI’s customer support monitoring dashboard into your application.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics refers to integration of analytical and data visualization capabilities such as dashboard into your software application without any hassle. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables nontechnical people to monitor data sets with attractive dashboards and glean all the insights they need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedding analytics in support apps
Analytics is essential to your support team, as it enables them to access and clearly view their key metrics. Let’s discuss ways in which embedded analytics helps managers of support teams:
- Improve customer satisfaction.
- Manage time effectively.
- Analyze current market trends.
- Improve decision-making.
Improve customer satisfaction
Embedded analytics will help you track key metrics like satisfaction rate, ticket subjects, and ticket count versus satisfaction rate. With the information from these metrics, manager can easily compare last month’s results and the this month’s results, identify spikes in tickets and whether customers are having similar problems, and determine whether changes should be made. If there’s a common issue or misunderstanding with the company’s product or service, observing these metrics can help the support team find it and relay the problem to operations or development teams that can fix it. This will result in more customer satisfaction with the company. Looking at feedback to support services can also help the support team improve its methodology. Soothing frustrated customers is part of support’s job, and monitoring satisfaction ratings while experimenting with different tactics can inform team members of their success.
Manage time effectively
Keeping an eye on the metrics mentioned before, like ticket count versus satisfaction rate, can also help support teams use their time more effectively. If a rise in ticket numbers corresponds to a fall in satisfaction rates, managers can look at how long customers are waiting for solutions and other factors that may be contributing. They can better determine whether they need to hire more staff or change their procedures, like how they prioritize tickets, to optimize their team’s time and satisfy more customers.
Analyze current market trends
By feeding your support data through an analytics program embedded in your application, support team managers can detect changes in the market that affect planning. For instance, by keeping track of feature requests from customers, a software company will be able to not only prioritize the most popular features but notice trends in the requests that indicate changes in the market, like the rising use of particular technologies. Presenting these trends in simple visualizations to planning teams lets them get ahead of demand.
Improves decision-making
Embedded analytics helps team leaders in the support department have an overview of their performance by tracking metrics such as created tickets, open tickets, and closed tickets. This enables them to gain insight into where they’ve improved from the past and make informed decisions on how they will continue to improve both their customer service and products in the future.
Bold BI support department dashboard example
Customer Support Monitoring Dashboard
Embedding a dashboard like the Customer Support Monitoring Dashboard helps companies that use Zendesk analyze support ticket volumes over time. They get detailed information about their tickets based on priority, type, and satisfaction rate over time.
Key metrics and KPIs in this dashboard example:
- Tickets by type.
- Ticket count vs. satisfaction rate.
- Ticket by channel.
- Ticket by priority.
- Created tickets.
- Closed tickets (last 30 days).
- Satisfaction rate.
- Open tickets (last 30 days).
- Open tickets (last 7 days).
- Closed tickets (last 7 days).
Tickets by type
This bar chart shows how many tickets are feature requests, bugs, and sales inquiries. Based on this information, leaders can easily prioritize their team’s work, clarify customer queries, fix bugs, and provide time for future requests.
Ticket count vs. satisfaction rate
This spline chart displays the number of tickets and the team’s customer satisfaction rate for the current month. This can show managers whether the volume of tickets affects support performance.
Tickets by channel
This doughnut chart shows the avenues through which your customers created support requests. It identifies the channels mostly being used by your customers.
Tickets by priority
This pie chart shows the distribution of tickets by priority. It helps leaders serve their customers and determine protocol for addressing tickets by both priority and time.
Created tickets
This number card shows tickets created by customers within the last 7 days.
Closed tickets (last 30 days)
This number card shows how many tickets were closed in the last 30 days.
Satisfaction rate
This number card shows an overall percentage of how satisfied the customers were with the support provided.
Open tickets (last 30 days)
This number card shows the open tickets the support team has yet to resolve from the last 30 days.
Open tickets (Last 7 days)
This number card shows the open tickets the support team has yet to resolve from the last 7 days.
Closed tickets (last 7 days)
This number card shows tickets that were closed after the customers changed the ticket status to resolved within the last 7 days.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Customer Support Monitoring Dashboard demo.
How to embed Bold BI’s Customer Support Monitoring Dashboard in your application
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your support department’s web applications. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards in 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, VueJS with Go, and VueJS with Core. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your support department has a portal like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself, saving significant development time. Follow these steps to embed a dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, first, you need to have an application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter a project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a Model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard root URL, site identifier, environment, user email, and embed secret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. Example: http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI, you should use `enterprise`.apiHost : An ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:5000/, which needs to be set as `apiHost`.
Step 3: Generate an embed secret.
You have to set the EmbedSecret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI Server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click Generate Secret to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI Server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create a Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched successfully with the dashboard details. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI Server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboards into your ASP.MVC application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample codes mentioned in all these steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, React with ASP.NET Core, and more, seamlessly. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help support departments be more successful. You can create any kind of dashboard you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on April 12, 2022.
