Dashboards are an important part of how state Unemployment insurance (UI) agencies begin to understand the potential adverse impacts on claimants’ ability to access their benefits imposed by agency access points, processes, and other administration methods. States are required to collect certain data points as part of administering the UI program, but delving deeper than the required reporting can increase awareness of opportunities to improve the claimant experience.
Using dashboards to track customer experience metrics
When building an internal dashboard, states should start by identifying the dashboard’s intended purpose and audience. Does leadership want to know the status of a process at a glance, or are analysts using it to identify and diagnose issues? Will the dashboard focus on one part of the claimant’s experience or provide information across a broader swath of the lifecycle of UI claims? Are there specific questions the dashboard should help display the answers to?
It would also help to consider how the dashboard’s display. Incorporating a printer-friendly version of the dashboard may be important so all the information is more easily available to an outside audience or one that cannot access the electronic version of the dashboard.
Answering these questions will help determine what data to include and exclude on the dashboard, whether the dashboard should show a comparison with data from a different time period, whether the dashboard should be interactive, and more. By asking these and other questions in setting up an internal dashboard, the state will be able to balance the need for information and context with legibility and brevity.
The example dashboards on this site provide helpful guidance for what a state might build. Each state will have different data available and may need to do additional work to get all the data necessary for their dashboard. That may require the state to find or develop methods, systems, or processes to collect that data, such who abandons their claim, at what point of the claim cycle, and for what reason. However, while a state works to get the data in place, they can still build a dashboard with the existing data and ensure that they can integrate the new data into the dashboard once available.
In this resource
- Example dashboard for initial applications by channel (mobile or desktop)
- Example dashboard for initial application by demographic characteristics
Related resources
- Attachment VI to Unemployment Insurance Program Letter No. 11-23 defines several categories of customer experience (CX) metrics
- CX Metrics blog post defines specific CX metrics that the example dashboards use
- The Equitable Access Toolkit has more resources for states looking to implement equitable access data collection and metrics processes