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How to Create a Customer Experience Dashboard in Excel

Cody Schneider•

Tracking your customer experience (CX) is the best way to understand if your business is delivering on its promises. A well-designed dashboard pulls all your key CX metrics into one place, but you don't need expensive software to build one. This guide will walk you through how to create a powerful, interactive customer experience dashboard right inside of Microsoft Excel.

What is a Customer Experience Dashboard (and Why Use Excel)?

A customer experience dashboard is a visual report that tracks, measures, and displays key customer-facing metrics. Think of it as a cockpit for your customer service and success teams, giving you an at-a-glance view of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and support efficiency. It helps you spot trends, identify recurring issues, and make informed decisions to improve how customers interact with your brand.

So, why Excel? While there are countless dedicated BI tools, Excel has three big advantages:

  • Accessibility: Nearly every business already has it. There's no need to purchase or learn a new platform.

  • Familiarity: Most team members have at least a basic understanding of Excel, lowering the learning curve significantly.

  • Control: You have complete control over your data inputs, calculations, and visual design without being locked into a specific software's limitations.

For small businesses, marketing agencies, and teams that need a straightforward solution without the overhead, Excel is the perfect starting point.

Choose the Right CX Metrics to Track

Your dashboard is only as useful as the metrics it contains. Before you start building, you need to decide what to measure. The right metrics align directly with your business goals, a concept often called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Don't try to track everything at once, start with a focused set of metrics that give you a clear picture of your CX health.

Here are some of the most common and effective CX metrics, grouped by the area they measure:

Satisfaction & Loyalty Metrics

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty by asking one simple question: "On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?" It's calculated by subtracting the percentage of "Detractors" (scores 0-6) from the percentage of "Promoters" (scores 9-10).

  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Gauges satisfaction with a specific interaction or product. It's typically asked on a 1-5 scale ("How satisfied were you with your recent support experience?") and is reported as the percentage of customers who gave a score of 4 or 5.

  • Customer Effort Score (CES): Measures how much effort a customer had to exert to get an issue resolved, using a question like, "How easy was it to get your issue resolved today?" A lower score is better here.

Retention & Engagement Metrics

  • Customer Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a given period. It's a critical indicator of customer dissatisfaction.

  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue you can expect from a single customer account. Improving CX almost always leads to a higher CLV.

  • Repeat Purchase Rate: The percentage of customers who have made more than one purchase. This is a great indicator of customer satisfaction and loyalty for e-commerce or retail businesses.

Support & Operational Metrics

  • Average Response Time: How long it takes for a customer support agent to first respond to a customer inquiry. Speed is a huge factor in customer satisfaction.

  • First Contact Resolution (FCR): The percentage of support tickets that are resolved in a single interaction. A high FCR means your team is efficient and knowledgeable.

  • Ticket Volume: The total number of support tickets opened over a period. Spikes in volume can indicate a product issue or a service outage.

Gather and Structure Your Data in an Excel Table

The foundation of any good dashboard is clean, well-organized data. Your task is to collect the raw data for your chosen metrics and arrange it in a way that Excel can easily understand.

First, you’ll need to export your data from its source systems. This might come from:

  • Survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms (for NPS, CSAT, CES data).

  • Your CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce (for CLV or churn data).

  • Helpdesk software like Zendesk or Intercom (for ticket volume and resolution times).

Export this data as a CSV or Excel file. Now, let's structure it for our dashboard.

Set Up Your Raw Data Sheet

  1. Open a new Excel workbook. Designate the first tab for your raw data. Rename it something clear, like "RawData".

  2. Copy your exported data into this sheet. Arrange it in a simple columnar format. Each row should be a single record (like a single survey response or a support ticket), and each column should be a specific data point.

  3. Use simple, descriptive headers for each column. For example: Date, CustomerID, NPS_Score, CSAT_Rating, Ticket_Type, Resolution_Time_Hours.

Your raw data might look something like this:

The Most Important Step: Format as a Table

This is an absolute pro-tip for building any dashboard in Excel. Instead of working with a static range of cells, convert your data into an official Excel Table.

Click anywhere inside your data range, then press Ctrl + T (or go to Insert > Table). Make sure the "My table has headers" box is checked, and click OK.

Why is this so important? An Excel Table is a dynamic range. When you add new rows of data later, the table expands automatically. Any charts or PivotTables connected to this table will include the new data when you hit refresh, without you having to manually update any formulas or data ranges. This saves a massive amount of time.

Building Your Dashboard: Step-by-Step Guide

Now for the fun part. We will use PivotTables and PivotCharts to slice, dice, and visualize our data. To keep things organized, create two new sheets: one named "Calculations" (where our PivotTables will live) and another named "Dashboard" (where the final visuals will be displayed).

Step 1: Summarize Data with PivotTables

PivotTables do the heavy lifting by aggregating your raw data. We'll create a few on our "Calculations" sheet.

Select your data table on the "RawData" sheet. Go to Insert > PivotTable. In the dialog box, make sure your table is selected as the source, and choose "Existing Worksheet" as the location, selecting cell A1 on your "Calculations" sheet.

Example 1: Analyzing CSAT Score Over Time

  1. Drag the Date field into the Rows area. Excel will automatically group it by months and years.

  2. Drag the CSAT_Rating field into the Values area. It will default to "Sum of CSAT_Rating".

  3. Click on "Sum of CSAT_Rating," select "Value Field Settings," and change the calculation to Average. Now you have your average CSAT score per month.

Example 2: Analyzing Ticket Volume by Type

  1. Create another PivotTable next to the first one on the "Calculations" sheet.

  2. Drag Ticket_Type to the Rows area.

  3. Drag Ticket_Type again to the Values area. It will automatically change to a "Count," giving you the total number of tickets for each type.

You can repeat this process to summarize all the key metrics you chose earlier, like NPS distributions (count of Promoters, Detractors, Passives), average resolution times, and more. Keep all these PivotTables on your "Calculations" sheet.

Step 2: Create Charts and Visuals

Now we’ll turn those PivotTables into easy-to-read charts that we'll move to our "Dashboard" sheet.

  1. Go back to your "Calculations" sheet and click inside your first PivotTable (Average CSAT by Month).

  2. Select the PivotTable Analyze tab, then click PivotChart.

  3. Choose a Line or Column chart and click OK. A chart will appear.

  4. Cut (Ctrl + X) the new chart and Paste (Ctrl + V) it onto your "Dashboard" sheet. Resize and position it where you want.

Repeat this process for your other PivotTables. Use the right chart for the job:

  • Line Chart: Perfect for tracking a metric over time (e.g., Average CSAT, Monthly Churn Rate).

  • Column/Bar Chart: Great for comparing categories (e.g., Ticket Volume by Type, NPS by Product).

  • Pie/Donut Chart: Use sparingly, but it can work for showing parts of a whole (e.g., breakdown of NPS Promoters vs. Detractors vs. Passives).

Design Tip: Clean up your charts! Right-click on the "field buttons" on the chart and select "Hide All Field Buttons on Chart." Remove unnecessary gridlines and labels to make the data stand out.

Step 3: Add Headline KPI Cards

Big, bold numbers help managers and executives see key takeaways instantly. We can create "KPI cards" at the top of our dashboard for things like overall NPS or average CSAT.

  1. On your "Dashboard" sheet, go to Insert > Shapes and draw a rectangle.

  2. Design it to your liking (change the fill color, remove the outline).

  3. Add a title using a Text Box (e.g., "Overall Average CSAT").

  4. To make the number dynamic, select the shape, click into the formula bar at the top, and type =. Then, navigate to your "Calculations" sheet and click on the cell containing the grand total for your CSAT score. Press Enter.

The text in your shape is now linked to your PivotTable! When the data updates, this card will update automatically.

Step 4: Make it Interactive with Slicers

Slicers are user-friendly buttons that filter your PivotTables and, by extension, your charts. This is what makes your dashboard truly interactive.

  1. Click on any of your charts on the "Dashboard" sheet.

  2. Go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and click Insert Slicer.

  3. A dialog box will appear with all your data fields. Check the box for the field you want to filter by, for instance, Date (as a Timeline is even better for dates) or Ticket_Type. Click OK.

Now, here’s the magic. To make one slicer control multiple charts, you need to connect it to all your PivotTables.

  1. Right-click the slicer and choose Report Connections. Check the boxes for all the PivotTables you created. Now, clicking a button on the slicer will filter every chart on your dashboard simultaneously.

Maintaining Your Dashboard

Your Excel CX dashboard is set up. To keep it useful, you just have to do two things:

  1. Add New Data: Periodically, export fresh data from your source systems and paste it directly into the next empty row of your table on the "RawData" sheet. The table will automatically expand to include it.

  2. Refresh All: Go to the Data tab and click the Refresh All button. Excel will automatically update all your PivotTables and charts with the latest information. No manual recalculations needed.

Final Thoughts

Creating a customer experience dashboard in Excel helps you translate raw customer feedback into clear, actionable insights without the need for complex software. By following these steps - choosing the right metrics, structuring your data correctly in an Excel Table, and using PivotTables with Slicers - you can build a dynamic and valuable tool for understanding and improving your customer journey.

While an Excel dashboard is a powerful starting point, the manual process of exporting CSVs and refreshing data can use up valuable time each week. At Graphed, we automate that process entirely. Instead of wrestling with spreadsheet reporting, we connect directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your CRM. You can create always-up-to-date, real-time dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English, getting back hours of your week so you can focus on acting on the insights instead of just gathering them.