Honest opinion about Dashboards | XM Community

Honest opinion about Dashboards

  • 15 February 2024
  • 2 replies
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I’ve been working in Dashboards for 3 months. After creating 3 dashboards, I see many technical limitations of this platform, and finding it hard to justify the time/cost/effort for broader implementation. We’ve already paid for the expanded license, so I’m more or less stuck with making it work as best I can.  However, I’m curious what others think of it, and if anyone has been able to successfully implement it for their organization.

 

Besides it being painfully clunky and slow, one of my biggest pain points is not being able to configure a 1-time benchmark using a custom metric calculation. The only workaround is manually entering it into the benchmark interface. 

 

Which leads to pain-point #2….it’s not possible to manually enter a new benchmark row under an existing benchmark which severely limits how I can use benchmarks. For example, say I calculated a custom metric and I want it to fall under an existing benchmark (Benchmark A). I’m forced to create brand new benchmark (Benchmark A, ver. 2’), because I can’t simply add an additional row. Reply by Qualtrics rep: This is by design. Benchmarks are designed to be iterated perhaps once or twice a year based on existing and generalised figures

 

Which doesn’t make sense, because if we obtain an additional datapoint that would fall under an existing benchmark (Ex. Product OSAT, and if we released an additional product later in the year), we’d still have to go the Version 2 route, regardless of how frequently we were to update the benchmark.

 

These are just a couple of many…

 

I have reached out to my Qualtrics rep, and the replies generally indicate that the platform doesn’t allow certain features ‘by design’. Now, why would Qualtrics purposefully limit their UX and restrict users from only using the platform based on how THEY want it to be used? 

 

They have provided some, but unhelpful workarounds, which include future proofing how surveys are constructed to make them more compatible within dashboards. This is all fine and good, but I’d wager that many users want to take advantage of using data already collected from previous surveys. And it’s not as if we knew to build our surveys in such a way to accommodate the dashboard feature which didn’t exist back then? (We’ve used Qualtrics for ~10 years)

 

I honestly feel that we were oversold on Dashboards. We had multiple conversations detailing our use cases, and the reps assured us that the platform could handle what we needed. 

 

What have been your experiences with dashboards? Am I just an outlier here, or are others experiencing difficulties? Has anyone been successful in rolling this out to the broader team? 


2 replies

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Hello @holw,

The company I’m currently working at has been using Qualtrics for around 5 years. I took the Qualtrics Technology Expert certification a couple of years ago, but never used the platform before until I started working at my current role a year ago.

I have experience using other competitor platforms, so my experience using Qualtrics has been an interesting challenge as IT and business acting as a single team have been pushing the limits of the tool on a constant basis to implement workaround for them, as well as for trying to replicate features available in other platform that we definitely need given the complexity of the programs we build.

In that sense, we’ve been successful at rolling out big, complex and highly visible programs but not without it’s complications and being forced to develop a deep understanding of where Qualtrics’ limits are. Also, knowing what else is out there to some extent, has been very important since we use it as reference for what we can explore to create in unorthodox ways to bring more value to our programs.

If you like, I’m open to having a conversation to help you out and brainstorm together on alternate routes you can try for the challenges you are facing. 😄

Best,

Daniel

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I have experienced the same. I have many application were the Dashboard features would be helpful but in every case, the poor performance or other limitation makes it completely useless for what I am trying to do. I attempted so far to use it for our NPS feedback analysis with Text IQ. But the fact that we can’t do any kind of filtering in text IQ makes it impossible to work with our amount of data. 

Now I am trying to do a very basic display of CSAT from different survey with competitor benchmark and I am hitting a wall again with technical difficulties

 

Best,
Lise

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