Slack is an amazing tool for staying connected with your team. It allows you to easily communicate with each other, share files, and collaborate on projects.
Unfortunately, if you’re a Customer Support team leader, and you want to share your Freshdesk KPIs and reports in Slack, you may have discovered this can be a manual, time-consuming process.
Freshdesk does have a great Slack integration but this is largely designed to support day to day operations, by notifying teams when tickets are created, and updated.
But what if you regularly want to share KPIs with your team, so they can build up an awareness of their key metrics, and be extra motivated to hit their targets? How do you share these KPIs in a way that’s instantly accessible and understandable to every member of the team?
In this guide, we’re going to show you how to use Geckoboard to create a live dashboard for your Freshdesk metrics, which regularly and automatically updates in your Customer Service team’s Slack channel.
What are the benefits of a Freshdesk dashboard for Slack?
If you work in an office before, you may have felt the benefits of a TV dashboard, which keeps team KPIs constantly visible.
For remote and hybrid teams, Slack is the virtual equivalent of the office space, and a Slack dashboard is the virtual equivalent of a physical TV dashboard. It can have many benefits:
- Constant awareness: Monthly reports are easily forgotten (if they are ever looked at in the first place). Whereas a dashboard that your team sees every day can support a more data-driven approach.
- Increased understanding: Your team starts to observe how metrics change over time, developing a greater understanding of how their work affects team performance.
- Motivated team members: Whether they are chasing team targets or individual goals, a dashboard can increase motivation and create friendly competition.
How to create a Freshdesk dashboard
Step 1: Sign up to Geckoboard and connect your Freshdesk account
Once you’ve signed up to Geckoboard’s free trial (you don’t need to enter any card details), you can start building your dashboard by selecting the Freshdesk data source.
To connect your Freshdesk account, just enter your company URL and API key.
Step 2: Create your first widget
Once you’ve connected your data, it’s time to start building widgets. A widget is just a data visualization like a number, a gauge or a bar chart. With each widget, you can choose which KPIs you want to show, and the best type of visualization for the job.
It’s likely you’ll want to show metrics related to Response Time, Resolution Time, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), or even number of support tickets created.
You can also add goals, comparisons and status indicators. These give your metrics valuable context and help your team understand if there’s anything on the dashboard they should pay closer attention to. In the example above, we’ve added a status indicator to show as green whenever CSAT is above 90%.
Step 3: Add more widgets and build up your dashboard.
To complete your dashboard, just continue adding the widgets until all your most important metrics are visible. With Geckoboard, it’s easy to drag, drop and resize to create a design that works for you and your team.
For more helpful advice on designing a dashboard, take a look at our guide.
Step 4: Connect your Slack account and automate regular snapshots
Once you’ve built a dashboard, it’s time to automate it to appear in your Slack workspace. Select ‘share’ from the menu then select “Slack”. Here you can connect your Slack account and schedule snapshots daily, weekly or monthly on set days and times. Perhaps you want to share a regular KPI dashboard just before your morning meeting? With Geckoboard, it couldn’t be easier.
Step 5: Talk about it
A Slack dashboard can be a great virtual watercooler – prompting the type of casual conversations that can really engage a team around their data.
Instead of just investigating key metrics when something is wrong, data (and conversations about data) can become a regular part of the team culture. In a way that builds access, awareness and understanding for every member of the team.
Try Geckoboard for free and start building your first Freshdesk dashboard for Slack, today.
