What Is a Dashboard?

A CRM Analytics dashboard is a collection of widgets that work together to tell a data story from multiple angles. Depending on what you want the dashboard to show or how to behave, you can add different widgets, such as key performance indicators, charts, tables, filters, and images.

When you share CRM Analytics data via a dashboard, you’re setting up your audience members to do some exploring of their own, without turning them loose on the whole dataset.

One use of a dashboard is to provide a focus for your audience. A dataset can contain vast amounts of data. Some of that data is relevant to specific questions that your audience has; some of that data is irrelevant noise. Data that’s critical to one set of questions is sometimes noise in relation to another set of questions.

Keep in mind that even though we call it a dashboard, we’re actually doing much more with this interface than we do with a traditional dashboard in a car. This dashboard doesn’t only tell us what’s changed; it invites us to dig deeper into the underlying data. It’s like using the speedometer in a car to tell us not just how fast we’re going but how our speed has changed at various points in our trip, how traffic conditions ahead of us are changing, and how those changes affect our arrival time.