Every number on your dashboard was once somebody’s afternoon

By Andre Prins

October 12, 2026

Picture a single line on a CX dashboard. Customer satisfaction for the month sits at 86%, comfortably green and a point up on last quarter. It is the kind of number that earns a nod in a leadership meeting before everyone moves on to the next slide.

Now picture what sits underneath it. Somewhere in that data is a finance manager who spent a Tuesday afternoon chasing an invoice query through three different teams. There is an operations lead who logged a fault at seven in the morning, before her own team had arrived, because she knew the day would unravel without it. There is a customer who scored us a three, then typed one careful sentence explaining why, and hoped that someone would read it.

Every number on a dashboard was once somebody’s afternoon. I find that a helpful thing to hold on to, because it is remarkably easy to forget.

Dashboards are wonderful servants

Let me say this upfront. I love a good dashboard. Over almost 30 years in IT services, many of them in service management and operations, I have seen what good measurement makes possible. It reveals trends you would never spot by instinct alone. It gives early warning before a small problem becomes a lost account. It turns a hunch into a business case that a CFO will happily support. In my own work I lean towards CSAT and Customer Effort Score, because together they tell me how a moment felt and how hard we made it for the customer.

The challenge is that a dashboard is a summary, and every summary is a choice about what to leave out. An average of 86% contains customers who were delighted and customers who were quietly close to leaving, blended into one reassuring figure. The number is not wrong. It is simply incomplete, and the part it leaves out is usually the human part.

When the data and the stories disagree

One of my favourite illustrations of this comes from Jeff Bezos. Speaking at the George W. Bush Presidential Center’s Forum on Leadership in 2018, he shared an observation that has stayed with me ever since: “When the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.” His point was not that data should be ignored. It was that a gap between the two usually means something is wrong with the way you are measuring.

On the Lex Fridman Podcast in December 2023, he told the story behind it. Amazon’s metrics showed customers reaching customer service in under 60 seconds, yet complaints about long waits kept arriving. During a meeting, he dialled the customer service number in front of his team, and they waited in silence for more than ten minutes. Nobody had fabricated the data. The team simply had not been measuring the right thing, and that one phone call set off a change in how they measured it.

What I love about that story is that the most senior person in the room chose to experience the service rather than defend the report. It took a single human moment to reveal what a carefully built metric had missed.

What happens when the number becomes the goal

There is a second risk, and it is a quieter one. In 1975 the British economist Charles Goodhart observed that statistical relationships tend to break down once pressure is placed on them for control purposes. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later captured the idea in the phrasing most of us know today, that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

In CX this shows up in very familiar ways. A handling time target encourages calls to be closed quickly rather than completely. A first contact resolution target encourages tickets to be closed and then reopened as new ones. A survey score linked to a bonus encourages people to ask, sincerely and politely, for a ten. None of this requires anyone to behave badly. People are simply responding to what they have been told matters. If the dashboard is what gets celebrated, the dashboard is what gets served.

The customer, meanwhile, never sees our targets. They only see whether their problem was solved and how it felt along the way.

Putting the people back into the picture

The good news is that none of this requires throwing out a single report. It requires reconnecting each number to the people it describes, and a handful of simple habits make a remarkable difference.

The first is reading the words, not just the scores. Verbatim comments are where the afternoon lives. Some of the most useful review meetings begin with a few minutes of customers’ own words before a single chart appears on screen, and it changes the tone of everything that follows.

The second is pairing every headline metric with a story. If effort scores improved, find the customer whose working day got easier and share what changed for them. If they fell, find the person who struggled and listen to the call. A story gives a number a face, and a face gives a team a reason to care.

The third is going to the source, just as Bezos did. Call your own service line. Raise a request through your own portal. Sit with your frontline for an hour and simply listen. My own motto has always been to shake a hand, make eye contact and listen to understand, and I have yet to find a dashboard that can do any of those things on my behalf.

The fourth is treating your frontline as the first readers of your data. Agents and engineers often know that a metric has drifted from reality weeks before it shows up in a report. When someone says, “the numbers look fine, but customers are frustrated,” that is not a complaint about the data. It may well be the most valuable insight you receive that month.

Finally, use metrics to ask better questions rather than to settle arguments. A good dashboard should send people towards customers, never away from them.

The most human thing a dashboard can do

I am genuinely optimistic about where this is heading. Better tools and AI now allow us to capture far more of the customer’s voice than ever before, from themes across thousands of comments to the effort involved across an entire journey. Used well, that technology does not replace the human story. It helps us find more of those stories, more quickly, and put them in front of the people who can act on them.

The organisations that get this right will not be the ones with the most impressive dashboards. They will be the ones whose people still remember, every time they look at a chart, that each point on it represents a person who trusted them with part of their day.

At Cybit, data sits at the heart of what we do as we work towards becoming the UK’s leading Intelligent Data Company. That gives me a front row seat to how powerful good data can be, and an equal appreciation for what it cannot do on its own. My aim in CX is to make sure our numbers always lead us back to our customers, to their outcomes and to the people behind every interaction, so that insight becomes action and action becomes an experience someone genuinely feels.

If you have found ways to keep the human story alive alongside your dashboards, I would genuinely love to hear about them. Whether it is a ritual in your review meetings, a creative way of sharing customer voices, or a metric you retired because it stopped telling the truth, feel free to reach out and let’s talk.

Measure everything that matters, just never forget who you are measuring.