Tableau CRM Service Cloud Dashboards: Start with an App Template

Yes, I’m also currently building out my own Omni-Channel and Salesforce Chat dashboards, but that doesn’t mean I’m not drawing inspiration from things that I already have. One of the greatest features of Tableau CRM is the App Templates that Salesforce gives you, and they give us more and more with each new release. In the Service Analytics App Template, you actually get a preconfigured Omni dashboard AND a preconfigured Chat dashboard (along with 16 other preconfigured dashboards!) As always, you can learn more about the template and how to set it up by following this Trailhead Module. But let’s check this out together and see what we actually get, and what inspiration we can draw from it!

App Setup

An important thing to remember – when you are first creating your app, in order to get the Omni and Chat options, you’ll need to select the Custom setup option.

Choosing this option gives you an additional menu where you can choose all the different data and features you want to add to the app, including Omni and Chat.

This option also lets you select things like Knowledge, Telephony, CSAT, and Business Hours! Continue going through all the menu items and answer questions about your data and then finish to start creating the app.

Omni

Out of the box, the Omni dashboard you get is pretty good and checks off a lot of the items on my list of requirements. Here are the components/visualizations you get:

• Incoming volume
• Average speed to answer
• Average handle time
• Average active time
• Incoming volume by Queue and by Channel
• Incoming volume over time by Channel
• Incoming volume by hourly breakdown
• Agents by volume
• Agent performance looking at Avg CSAT and Handle Time
• Details of each Work Item

That’s a lot of stuff! There’s actually not a lot I would need or want to change about these either. One thing you’ll notice though, is that everything is measured in seconds. In my Salesforce reports, I’ve updated these types of measures to be minutes instead because that is more useful for us. And I actually look at Case routing metrics in hours! These are easy things to change though – just divide by 60 to get minutes and so on.

I don’t want to show you the rest of the components because it has real people’s names and what not, but I encourage you to set this up in a Trailhead Playground or in your sandbox and check the whole thing out!

Chat

The Chat dashboard is fully loaded too, with similar components as on the Omni dashboard. Here’s what you get with Chat:

• Total Chats
• Average wait time
• Average handle time
• Number of agents answering chats
• Requested chat volume over time
• Average visitor response time
• Average agent response time
• CSAT
• Chat count by type
• Chat volume breakdown in 15 min intervals
• Average wait over time
• Average agent response over time
• Average visitor response over time
• Agents by chat volume
• Agent performance by chat volume and response time
• Details of each chat

Whoa! Again, not a lot to change with what we get except for that tracking in seconds thing. Here’s a sample of what you get:

So Why Not Just Use This?

It seems silly to try and recreate these and I should just add the missing items to what’s here, right? Well there are a couple reasons why I don’t usually use the templates out of the box. The first being that each app comes with its own dataflow (sometimes multiple!) and that eats at my dataflow limits and also the time it takes to run my dataflows. Most of this data already lives in a dataflow already, so there is no reason to recreate it. I like to review the app created dataflow for any best practices or calculations I might find interesting and then STEAL THEM and add them into my existing flows. And since I’m not going to be using any of these datasets, it would take a long time to go through each query and switch out the dataset, make sure everything is named the same, etc. I find its actually faster to just rebuild. I also use a different color scheme for my Service Cloud reporting, so updating every widget to match my branding would take a long time.

I spoke with a Tableau CRM product manager once about how I love their templates but I usually just steal stuff from them and don’t actually use them in production. He was super excited about that and said they encourage people to do that! They understand that these templates won’t work for everyone and nearly everyone will need to customize them in some way for their business. These templates should be considered a starting point to either edit and make your own, or just draw inspiration from like I do.