

At Vend we have a team of around 65 agents, split across offices in Auckland, Toronto and London, who support customers of our retail point-of-sale system. Our customers are scattered around the globe, with most of them in APAC and AMER, so we’ve adopted a ‘follow the sun’ model so we can give customers timely support.
As our global support team grew, we realized that as an agent, you know what you’re doing, but you don’t necessarily know what's going on in other offices’ support teams — or even in your own team. We wanted a way for agents to see their contribution, how it interacts with the rest of our support operation, and how it contributes to wider company goals.
This is our main dashboard that helps with that. At a glance it gives a holistic overview of our current month's performance but also the intra-day breakdown. We’ve got it on a loop with several other dashboards, on a 2 minute cycle.
In the past year, our global Support team grew 40% so what was previously an easy handover on Slack was no longer cutting it. We wanted to give our global teams the context and transparency of our stats for the current day and how we're tracking against our monthly KPIs. Before Geckoboard, we would update the teams on our KPIs at the end of the month, which created a disconnect throughout the month.
As our team grew, so did our channel offering. We now have three different channels — phone, web, and chat — and each team member is assigned a different channel throughout the day. As we use Intercom and Zendesk for our support channels, we never had a centralized place to tell us where everyone was at a particular point in the day. With Geckoboard, we can see at a glance who is online across our real-time channels.
So, the main reason for making this dashboard was to create visibility across the entire team. We wanted everyone to see their contribution, and how it interacts with the rest of the company.
When we started giving agents a little bit more visibility on the bigger picture, everyone started craving more.
The aim of this dashboard is to give a high-level overview, so we can see at a glance where we’re up to on a monthly basis, but also on an intra-day basis. The metrics on here are as follows:
When I first built this dashboard, we probably got a little trigger-happy, and added anything and everything. I thought “everyone wants all the information, so let’s give them all the information!”. Then we quickly realised it was just too much information, and people weren’t going there because it was a sea of numbers.
So we stripped it back and removed a lot of the unnecessary data on there. The aim now is to only show the information the team actually needs to know. Anything that’s not really relevant has been removed.