When Is a Power BI Dashboard Enough for Your Business Needs?

Imagine you, like many others, use a PowerBI; Microsoft’s software for turning business data into visual reports and dashboards. The dashboard shows that more and more customers stop using your services (they churn). At the next team meeting, a colleague asks which customers you should contact first in order to improve customer-retention and prevent them from leaving.

To your frustration, finding the answer to this takes longer than you thought was necessary. An account manager has to check customer records in the CRM-system, open support tickets and review recent activities. Before anyone is able to make a call, the team has to pull information together from various places and interpret them accordingly.

A dashboard like Power BI can help you notice many patterns and problems, like customer retention and churn factors. But whether it works well for your business, depends on the work your team still needs to do after receiving access to this data; such as understanding what happened, deciding who needs attention or arranging a follow-up.

This article therefore helps you determine whether a platform like PowerBI suits your business context, or if another approach is better suitable.

When is Power BI suitable for your business context?

Power BI works well if your team already knows well which data points matter for your business goals and how you can use them. Because then, gathering those figures in one place may be enough to support your daily operations, which is exactly the area where Power BI performs well.

For example, you might want to review revenue changes, customer growth and cancellations without putting together a spreadsheet each week (no offence to Excel). Power BI can give you a shared overview of those figures, with reports that let you explore each of these changes fairly automatically.

Within Power BI, Microsoft distinguishes between a dashboard which provides a single-page overview, and a report which supports more detailed filtering and exploration. Both of these environments can help people to more efficiently use the information they previously had to gather themselves. With these benefits it makes sense that many organisations tend to default to Power BI's their platform of choice!

However, to determine whether Power BI is actually the best choice for your business context, you should consider the following question: once your team has an overview of the required metrics your business goals require, can they already make the decision they need to make (or does it require additional next-steps)?

Bottlenecks in a Power BI dashboard

Let’s say you want to measure customer-retention. Knowing that cancellations among your customers have sharply risen, logically helps management to identify a clear retention issue. The next step however, such as determining which customers to contact first in order to prevent more cancellations, requires more information.

Perhaps a customer has stopped using the service you provide or maybe they have an unresolved complaint about your product-quality. Combining those data-driven signals could help an account manager decide whether to reach out to the customer, and on what grounds they should be approached.

You can assign a priority-score that ranks customers for follow-up, which may help to determine which customers need to be reached out to, and are likely to convert. But these customer profiles still need context, or data-driven signals, that help explain why they risk to churn away from your business. Reduced usage of your service could (among many things) reflect: dissatisfaction, a seasonal slowdown or a customer finishing their project. To determine what actually the customer is experiencing and what they need, the account manager needs enough context to assess what is happening. This is where insufficient data-insights often becomes a bottleneck.

That is why it is important to look at the follow-up process alongside the metrics shown in the dashboard. Because your business should not only be aware of identifying the signals, but more importantly, your business should be able to interpret the data with sufficient context. Only then, decisions can be grounded in practical evidence.

How businesses use Power BI effectively

We found a case study done by Microsoft on a customer-service provider named TTEC, which describes a platform that brought together information from multiple disconnected systems. They optimised these systems with machine learning algorithms and made them tangible through Power BI visualisations. In this case, employees could easily access customer context, while the added algorithms estimate likely outcomes from patterns in the underlying data. This formed an expansion to the Power BI platform that now supports the employees in quickly identifying customers at risk of leaving.

Such a platform can be more difficult to obtain as it requires additional tools. For this reason, it makes sense that this is an enterprise-level case study, with a scale much larger than an SME normally holds. However, it shows the value of how a dashboard can fit into a broader process for interpreting information and supporting the subsequent actions.

Power BI can also support business-specific calculations, and its alerts can trigger workflows through Power Automate, Microsoft’s tool for automating tasks between applications. So those requirements do not automatically mean you need a separate custom application, as Microsoft already provides support for this.

In many cases however, business questions such as signalling and improving upon customer-retention issues, can become very context-specific to particular customer and business needs. Oftentimes, this results in a business adopting several systems and tools where each one solves a specific piece of the puzzle. This is where standardised platforms like Power BI become less suitable.

The cost of having many systems

When employees have to combine signals from their CRM, inventory system, and Power BI in order to interpret customer behaviour, we call this a fragmented workflow. These fragmented workflows may actually work well for your business. But over time, each of these little manual handovers between systems quickly take up significant capacity of your team. This results in employees spending unnecessary hours on a task, which ultimately cuts into the revenue of the business.

The case study of Growth99 shows an impressive success story on reducing these manual handovers between their fragmented systems. Their 30-person customer-experience team was using Monday, Zoho, Calendly, Asana and other tools in parallel. After internal calculations, it was estimated that each of their employees spent roughly four hours per week on tasks that could be automated; simply by connecting the systems within their fragmented workflow. One custom-made dashboard that connects each of these systems now saves their employees roughly 120 hours each week, previously lost to manual overhead!

When should you consider a custom dashboard?

We understand that not all businesses are ready for such an investment of creating a unified dashboard. However, cases like these remind us of the importance of monitoring and understanding how your business operates on a daily basis and where bottlenecks may evolve. Because even when unnecessarily lost time seems minimal, this cost of efficiency grows along with your business and can quickly take more capacity than you realise.

Start with one decision your team struggles with

Before deciding what software your business needs, start with one decision your team regularly struggles with and desires to improve upon, such as: which customer profiles need a follow-up, to improve our customer-retention?

Then consider: - What data or information is needed to understand the customer behaviour and needs? - How should this data be interpreted to provide reliable outcomes? - Who decides what actions should follow?

If your team regularly struggles to answer these questions, the bottleneck is probably caused by the need to combine customer information from different sources and to interpret those signals together. Because when employees are only given an overview of seemingly incoherent datapoints, they may not have enough context to prioritise customers and organise suitable follow-up actions. For these types of bottlenecks, a custom dashboard or tools are often better suitable for the decisions your company needs to make compared to a standalone Power BI dashboard.

Make people your highest priority

Discuss these questions with the people who actually perform the work. Identify what information they collect manually, how they assess customer behaviour, where and how they take the resulting actions. This will reveal where the current workflow is falling short.

Then assess whether adjusting your Power BI configuration or integrating existing tools would support that work, and whether a separate, custom-built application would provide enough added value to justify the investment.

Checking in with the people who are responsible for the actual work helps you avoid a common mistake that most companies still make: a tech-first approach. In this approach, organisations integrate new software because they think it resolves the challenge they’re facing, only to find out that no improvements are achieved.

According to a Deloitte research on AI-adoption, a tech-first approach is currently one of the largest bottlenecks in providing value through newly implemented software. So, instead of rushing to incorporate AI into your business because you think it will solve the problem, maintain a people-first approach. Talk to your team and understand their daily workflow. Because before determining what platform to use for your business context, it is critical to understand the bottlenecks it needs to alleviate.

Conclusion: Match the solution to the decision

Power BI may be a sufficient tool if your team has a shared view of the necessary information and can already use that information to make decisions and organise appropriate follow-up actions.

If employees still have to reconstruct the context of customer interactions on their own and manually pass on tasks, the broader workflow requires attention, and a custom solution may be more appropriate.

The examples in this article show how linking information and follow-up actions from different sources can provide employees with more context and reduce manual handoffs. Depending on the challenge your company decides to address, that improvement may involve adapting the existing setup, integrating systems, or developing custom software.

Regardless of the method and software you choose, the investment should be justified by the work it helps improve.

To determine whether Power BI is suitable for your business context, you must therefore first identify the decisions your team needs to make and then assess what is required to help them take action on those decisions.

If you want to explore what your team needs from its data and how your system can be optimised for your business context, please reach out to us. We face these challenges regularly, and are happy to think it through with you!