Providing your customers with a real-time analytics dashboard is a crucial step in enhancing transparency, engagement, and customer satisfaction. Whether you need to share performance metrics, showcase the value of your services, or empower your clients with actionable insights, you are going to need a core app dashboard (or customer dashboard).
We’ve already discussed why businesses need customer dashboards in another post: 5 Reasons Your Need a Dashboard. Reasons include the need for real-time reporting, boosting retention, and proving the value of your services. Additionally, in many businesses some form of reporting is mandatory. Now that you're convinced of the importance, let’s explore the different ways you can go about building a dashboard for your customers, and we’ll weigh the pros and cons of each.
When it comes to building a customer-facing dashboard, you have several options, ranging from fully custom-built solutions to leveraging existing analytics tools or using purpose-built SaaS platforms, exactly for this use case. Let's explore each method in detail:
Building a Core App Dashboard Completely from Scratch
Building a customer dashboard from scratch provides the most flexibility and control, allowing you to create a solution tailored exactly to your needs. This approach gives you the freedom to design every aspect of the user interface, choose how data is handled, and integrate it seamlessly with your existing systems. However, it also comes with significant complexity and cost. Developing a custom dashboard involves building both the front-end and back-end, requiring skilled developers and potentially months of work, depending on the scope of the project.
On the front-end, modern JavaScript frameworks like React.js, Vue.js, or Angular are often used to create interactive and dynamic user interfaces. These frameworks enable you to build responsive dashboards that deliver a smooth, real-time experience for customers. For visualizing data, libraries like D3.js or Chart.js are commonly used to create charts, graphs, and other visuals that present complex data in an intuitive way. The front-end design and layout can be enhanced with CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS to speed up development and ensure a polished look.
No-code or low-code app development solutions can speed up work, although it is still a big project. These solutions are also known to limit flexibility and future possibilities.
Pros:
- Full Customization: Building a dashboard from the ground up allows you to create a fully tailored solution that meets your exact business needs.
- Infinite Possibilities: You can add any feature or design element you want, without being restricted by third-party tool limitations.
- Scalability and Control: You have full control over how the dashboard scales and integrates with your existing systems.
Cons:
- Expensive: Developing a dashboard from scratch requires a team of developers, designers, and ongoing maintenance, making it the most expensive option.
- Time-Consuming: Building and testing a dashboard can take months to launch, slowing your time to market.
- Maintenance and Upgrades: Regular updates, bug fixes, and feature additions can be costly and time-intensive.
- No-Code Tools: While no-code platforms can speed up development, they come with limitations in customization, often restricting advanced features.
This method is ideal if you have very specific requirements and the budget to support a fully custom solution.
Building a Customer Dashboard with Tools like Tableau, Power BI or Qlik
Building a customer dashboard using tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Qlik can be tempting because of their powerful analytics and visualization features. However, these tools are primarily designed for internal use. While you can technically manage access rights, it becomes impractical when serving a large number of customers. Handling credentials and permissions for hundreds or thousands of users is complex and inefficient.
Moreover, their licensing models are a major issue—they operate on a per-user basis, which quickly becomes prohibitively expensive when you have to pay the full license for every user of every customer. Another drawback is that these platforms offer limited branding capabilities, making it hard to fully customize the dashboard to align with your company’s look and feel.
In short, while these tools are great for internal analytics or a few high-value clients, they are not feasible for scaling customer-facing dashboards due to high costs, limited branding, and cumbersome user management.
Pros:
- Powerful Analytics Capabilities: Tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Qlik are excellent for building sophisticated dashboards and integrating with various data sources.
- Rapid Development: If you're already familiar with these platforms, you can build and deploy dashboards relatively quickly.
- Advanced Visualization Features: These platforms offer out-of-the-box visualizations and features that can display complex data in user-friendly formats.
Cons:
- Limited Custom Branding: These tools don’t allow for deep customization, which means your dashboard may not fully align with your brand’s design or style.
- Not Ideal for Large Customer Bases: Managing credentials and accounts for a large number of users can be complex and expensive, as these platforms are typically built for internal use or a few high-profile clients.
- License Costs: The licensing models for these platforms are usually designed for large enterprise clients, making them prohibitively expensive for serving large customer bases.
This method works well if you have only a few large clients, each with very specific needs and you have to tailor each dashboard. Or if the cost isn’t a major concern.
Using a Purpose-Built SaaS Solution like CustomerDashboard.io
Pros:
- Cost-Efficient: Purpose-built solutions are designed specifically for customer-facing dashboards, offering affordable pricing models suitable for businesses of any size.
- Quick Deployment: Solutions like CustomerDashboard.io allow you to build and launch a dashboard in just a few hours, significantly reducing time to market.
- Scalable: Fully automated onboarding, user credential management, and the ability to handle thousands of customer accounts with ease.
- Custom Branding: Dashboards can be fully branded with your company’s colors, logos, and even run on your own domain.
- Customization Options: While not as flexible as building from scratch, purpose-built solutions often allow for custom sections to be developed and embedded within the dashboard, giving you a blend of pre-built and custom functionality.
Cons:
- Limited Flexibility: While SaaS platforms offer plenty of customization options, they won't provide the full level of flexibility that a completely custom-built solution would.
- Less Control: As a hosted solution, you're dependent on the provider for updates and feature requests, although many platforms offer regular upgrades.
This method is ideal for businesses looking for a balance of cost, speed, and scalability, especially when you need to launch quickly without sacrificing professionalism or customer experience.
Conclusion
Building a customer-facing analytics dashboard can be approached in several ways, each with its own advantages and trade-offs. If you need full customization and control, building from scratch is the way to go, but expect high costs and lengthy development. On the other hand, existing analytics tools like Tableau and Power BI offer powerful data visualization capabilities, though they may not be ideal for large customer bases or complete branding needs.
For a balance of affordability, speed, and customization, purpose-built SaaS solutions like CustomerDashboard.io offer a highly efficient option. These platforms can be launched in hours, are fully branded, and can scale to accommodate any number of users—all while keeping costs in check.
No matter which route you choose, understanding the pros and cons of each method will help you make the best decision for your business and your customers.
If you’d like help discovering the right solution for your business, we're happy to assist! Contact us at sales@customercashboard.io to book a free consultancy meeting, where we can explore your needs and recommend the best approach.