Today’s businesses deal with large volumes of data day in and day out.
Data gives you actionable insights into customer behavior. It helps you optimize business processes and develop customer-centric objectives. Moreover, according to a Harvard Business Review survey, data-driven companies are likely to be more profitable and efficient.
Well-structured data makes it easy for you to identify trends or outliers and make better data-driven decisions. However, data in organizations is often fragmented. Dealing with big data also means dealing with data permissions. Lastly, data collection and analysis are time-consuming and repetitive processes.
A customer relationship management or CRM dashboard is a critical growth driver. But how does it impact your organization? What do you need to consider when setting up a CRM dashboard?
This guide explores how to optimize your business using a CRM dashboard and explains how to set up a CRM dashboard for your business.
What Is a CRM Dashboard?
Your CRM dashboard serves as a centralized hub that houses all your data, from KPIs to activities. It organizes large volumes of information and visualizes them, making it easier to absorb insights and make data-driven decisions.
Role in managing customer relationships and data
A reliable CRM dashboard gives you access to real-time data and tracking. It offers in-depth, holistic insights into your customers, allowing you to get to know them better. Consequently, this enables you to easily identify prospects and craft consistent, personalized customer experiences.
CRM dashboard software streamlines sales processes by automating manual tasks like data collection and giving you a real-time overview of your sales pipeline. These capabilities help you address inefficiencies in your operations and uncover new growth opportunities.
What Are the Key Benefits of CRM Dashboards?
From building better workflows for project management to fulfilling gaps in business processes, CRM dashboards are powerful integrated tools.
Enhanced data visualization and insights
Data visualization uncovers patterns that may have been overlooked by data models or statistics, such as unusual data distribution or missing values. Furthermore, it supports strategic decision-making. Instead of scouring through all your data to find answers, data visualization gives you quick insights into your business’s different aspects.
For instance, a Lark CRM dashboard is customizable, allowing you to configure chart settings so you can effectively identify patterns and make more accurate forecasts.
Real-time updates for timely decision-making
Unlike spreadsheets, CRM dashboard software can update data in real time. This equips sales representatives and project managers with fresh data for better decisions.
Improved customer service and retention
A CRM dashboard lets you focus on what matters most: your customers. With accessible, easy-to-digest customer data and data-backed predictions, you’re in a better position to make customer-centric decisions.
Boosted team collaboration
A CRM dashboard streamlines workflows. A centralized database ensures team members can access and share information, regardless of device. This enhances communication and drives agile collaboration, which helps you develop better sales tactics.
What to Consider When Creating Your CRM Dashboard
Say you’re working with different teams across your organization, from sales to customer service. How do you create a customer relationship dashboard that aligns with each team’s needs, preferences, and goals?
When creating a custom CRM dashboard, keep these pointers in mind.
Choose which KPIs to display
Avoid displaying too many metrics on your CRM dashboard. This can bury key signals at first glance and you may end up overlooking metrics with a higher impact.
Instead, prioritize customizing your CRM dashboard so that it aligns with your changing needs. Doing so ensures you focus on the necessary information and metrics.
When deciding on which KPIs to display, focus on those that can help you better understand your customers, such as:
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer engagement score (CES)
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Combine these customer-centric KPIs with internal KPIs like financial and productivity metrics. Make sure your chosen KPIs are actionable. This means that they’re aligned with your business objectives and are linked to actions to facilitate follow-throughs.
Determine your crucial sales goals and methods
In a CRM Talk podcast episode, Sam Biardo (Technology Advisors) and Steve Chipman (CRM Switch) talked about one of the biggest drivers for CRM implementation. Businesses implement CRM systems because they want to see what’s coming down the pipeline.
Knowing your goals and objectives helps you identify crucial indicators for your dashboard. As your sales goals evolve, you can always change the indicators displayed.
Streamline your CRM dashboard’s appearance
Consistency in your choice of visualization options lets you showcase the relationship between related metrics more effectively. Apply hierarchy in your dashboard. For example, if you have an important chart you want to emphasize, place it in a prominent space in your dashboard or enlarge it.
Lark simplifies this by letting you drag blocks to different tiles on your dashboard. Dragging the corners of each block also lets you enlarge or shrink each data visualization block.
Ensure your CRM dashboard is understandable
Your CRM dashboard should be easy to access and understand, allowing you and your team to make the most of your data insights. Customizable templates can help you create dashboards that meet your specific needs.
For example, you can use Lark’s CRM Analytics Dashboard to display accurate, up-to-date information according to key metrics, making it easier to track performance.
Continue to improve your CRM dashboard
An excellent CRM dashboard is adaptable and customizable. Therefore, choose a CRM dashboard software that you can easily modify to complement your business and pivot with your changing needs. Check whether it’s compatible with AI-driven technologies, which can help you automate tasks, get AI-driven insights, and ask complex questions about your data.
Explore Lark Features While Using CRM Dashboards
With Lark, you get one intuitive platform that combines tools for project management, automation, and more to streamline your tech stack. Using Lark Base, a tool that lets you build workflows and CRM dashboards, you can create CRM dashboards that you want to use—no coding needed.
Lark Base helps you optimize processes, transform sales figures and sales fluctuations into easily digestible visualizations, and more. Explore Lark Base features that let you create functional and convenient CRM dashboards.
Real-time data synchronization
Lark Base enables seamless data integration from multiple sources, enhancing your workflow. With two-way link fields, you can connect records across tables for real-time syncing. You can also link existing base files and insert CRM dashboards into Lark Docs for easy updates.
Additionally, Lark Base allows you to sync data between bases, either selectively or automatically. This feature facilitates unified management and data backup, creating a centralized hub for information that streamlines cross-team collaboration.
Advanced role-based permissions
With Lark Base, you can enable advanced permissions for more detailed access control. This feature allows you to specify who can view and edit specific fields or records within a table. You can also manage access to dashboards and views by creating and assigning roles that cater to the unique permission needs of your team members.
Custom filters and grouping options
When working with large datasets, you can use the group and filter functions for efficient data management.
The group function helps you categorize data based on specific criteria, enabling easier analysis and insight generation. The filter function allows you to narrow down datasets to display only the information you need, which is especially useful for collaboration and focusing on relevant data points.
For your CRM dashboard, filters can highlight key data, enhancing your analysis and focus. By utilizing these functions, you can optimize data organization and improve your analytical capabilities in Base.
How to Use Lark to Set Up Your CRM Dashboard
With Lark Base, you can use a free CRM template from Lark to create a basic CRM dashboard. From here, you need to design a dashboard tailored to your specific needs. Here’s how you do it:
Define your business goals
Before building your CRM dashboard, ask yourself these key questions:
Who is the CRM dashboard for?
How will it facilitate decision-making?
Will you use it to monitor a system?
Are you using it to track the progress of a specific goal?
Additionally, think about your business processes and organizational preferences. For example, do you have distinct customer segments or unique sales pipelines? You may want to create separate dashboards for different customer groups to better reflect your workflows.
Finally, when using Lark Base, make sure to check the data source for the information on your dashboard and confirm what content will be shown.
Customize your dashboard with blocks
Lark Base offers powerful data visualization tools to create a dashboard that tells a compelling story. Once your goals are defined, you can configure your CRM dashboard using a variety of visual blocks. You can add different types of blocks, including charts, word clouds, buttons, and more to tailor your dashboard to your team’s needs.
To add a block, open your dashboard in Base and click Add Block at the top of the dashboard. You can then select the type of block you need and configure the data source, data range, and more as needed.
Advanced permissions management
Lark Base allows you to set custom permissions to control who can access or edit your data. Dashboard permissions and table permissions are independent of each other, which means the configuration of one will not affect the other.
By setting up advanced permissions in Base, you ensure that sensitive information is protected while reducing information burden among team members.
Integration within the Lark ecosystem
A Lark CRM dashboard connects with the entire Lark ecosystem. This makes it easier to collaborate, share insights, and keep your team updated. Here are some ways you can use your dashboard with the rest of Lark.
Set up automation
You can set up automation workflows in Lark Base so that team members receive real-time updates about changes to your data. For example:
Notify sales teams when a key deal progresses through the pipeline.
Alert customer service teams when new customer feedback is added.
Automatically send updates to leadership when critical metrics reach predefined thresholds.
Automated notifications ensure that everyone stays informed without the need for manual updates.
Share insights in Lark Docs
Lark’s collaborative document tools make it easy to share your CRM dashboard and insights:
Embed your dashboard or charts directly into Lark Docs to create reports or summaries.
Share the document with your team or leadership to discuss trends and strategies.
Use inline commenting to gather feedback and collaborate on action plans.
This allows for seamless communication about key business insights without switching between platforms.
Collaborate during Lark Meetings
Lark Meetings integrates perfectly with your CRM dashboard to enhance remote collaboration:
Use the screen sharing feature during meetings to display your dashboard to colleagues in different offices or working remotely.
Walk through key metrics, trends, and insights together in real time.
Annotate or highlight specific areas on the dashboard to focus discussions and ensure clarity.
Train your team
Make sure that your staff fully understand and know how to use your dashboard. Provide them with comprehensive training and give them access to self-help resources like training videos and guides.
Use Lark to train your team members. Lark Minutes is a nifty feature that converts audio and video recordings into interactive text.
It simplifies how you search, organize, and review resources like meeting notes, interviews, and more. You can search for keywords, translate text, edit transcripts, and leave comments. Lark Minutes also lets you create audio or video clips, add subtitles, and download recordings.
Monitor and optimize
Your CRM dashboard is a work in progress. Regularly monitor its performance and make adjustments to align with your evolving business goals.
Work closely with your team to review what’s working and identify areas for improvement. By continuously optimizing your CRM dashboard, you can ensure it remains a valuable tool for your business.
Case Studies: Lark’s Impact on Business Efficiency
See how Lark has helped global businesses scale their operations, foster enhanced collaboration, and more.
Vikings Luxury Buffet
Vikings Luxury Buffet, a food and beverage company in the Philippines managing several restaurant brands, was expanding its operations. The company faced challenges in maintaining standards, monitoring its revenue, building a community among its employees, and coordinating new store openings.
With Lark, Vikings had a comprehensive overview of operations. The company used Base to track multiple projects, helping save time by up to 40%. With Base’s one-click features, project managers were able to generate Gantt charts and timeline visualizations.
Haidilao
Global Chinese food and beverage chain Haidilao faced numerous challenges as it sought to expand globally while embracing digital transformation to be able to operate on a larger scale. These include inconsistencies in customers’ dining experiences due to delayed store updates and the lack of revenue insights.
Haidilao uses Lark Workplace to give its 100,000 employees access to centralized documents like guidelines and standards. They can easily facilitate daily conversations with other employees. They were also able to digitize processes in Lark Base. Since using Lark, Haidilao has been able to unify its standards and leverage automated processes, helping the company deliver consistent and high-quality service across various locations.
Redefine How You Work with Lark
Data allows organizations to adapt and respond. The best CRM dashboards empower you by transforming data into actionable insights. With Lark as your productivity superapp, it's easier than ever to digitize operations, gain deeper insights, and scale your business.
By choosing Lark for your CRM dashboard, you benefit from seamless integration with existing workflows, customizable features, and real-time data updates. This all-in-one solution streamlines collaboration and helps you unlock the full potential of your data, driving your organization’s success.
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