What a hospitality CRM dashboard should show

A dashboard is one view of the numbers your guest data already produces. Here is which of them deserve a tile.

A CRM dashboard is worth having if it changes something you do this week. Most of them do not, which is why they get built, admired for a fortnight and then quietly ignored.

A dashboard is one view of the numbers your guest data produces: bookings, Wi-Fi sign-ins, orders, reviews and campaign sends. The gain is that nobody assembles them by hand on a Monday morning, and you notice a drop on the day it happens rather than at the end of the month.

The numbers worth watching

Keep it to figures you would act on. Six tiles nobody reads is worse than three somebody does.

• Repeat visit rate over the last 90 days. It tells you whether your marketing is retention or just noise.

• Opt-in rate, meaning how many of the people who walked in left you a way to contact them. If this is low, everything downstream is guesswork.

• Average spend per head and per visit. This is what a guest is worth, and whether a promotion moved it.

• No-shows and cancellations against bookings taken. A rising rate usually means reminders are not going out.

• Review volume, average score and how long a response takes. Bookings follow the score.

• Revenue per send, not open rates. Opens are easy to flatter and hard to bank.

Each of these comes from data you already collect. What a dashboard does is put them next to each other so a pattern is visible, which is the part spreadsheets are bad at. We wrote about finding your loyal guests in this data.

Real time is the whole point

A monthly report tells you what happened. A live view tells you what is happening, which is the only version you can do anything about.

Take online bookings. A fall this week could mean demand has dropped, or it could mean the booking widget broke on Thursday and nobody noticed. Only a live number separates the two, and only the second one is fixable by you.

The same applies to campaigns. If a send goes out with the wrong link or the wrong venue name, you want to know within the hour.

One view the team can share

A dashboard that only the manager can log into does very little. When the head of marketing, the floor manager and the owner are looking at the same figures, the conversation stops being about whose impression of last Saturday is right.

It also gives a new starter somewhere to look. Somebody who has been in the business a month can see what good looks like without waiting to be told.

Build it around the decision you are making

The customisation people want is narrower than it sounds. Pick the tiles that answer the question you have this quarter, then change them next quarter.

If you are testing a loyalty scheme, watch sign-ups and repeat visits. If you are trying to fill midweek, watch covers by day and campaign revenue by send. If you are worrying about reputation, watch review volume and response time. A dashboard built for every question answers none of them.

Where they fall over

Three failure modes cover most abandoned dashboards. They report on things nobody in the building can change, they live behind one person's login, or they show averages that hide a bad Friday inside a good week.

Fix all three by asking, before you add a tile, who is going to look at it and what they would do differently if it moved.

Stampede builds this view from the guest data your venue already generates across bookings, Wi-Fi, PayOS, reviews and marketing, so the numbers come from one place rather than four exports. See analytics and reports and guest profiles.