1. The cost of a contact centre dashboard is not the licence price
A contact centre dashboard is one of the cheaper parts of a customer contact centre. Yet it is one of the parts organisations most often regret. Not because it was too expensive when they bought it, but because the model did not fit the way a customer contact centre works and grows.
The real cost has four parts: the licence, the integrations with your systems, the implementation and the administration over the contract term. The licence’s pricing model then determines how the other three behave. That is why the choice between paying per user and paying per dashboard is not a detail for the buyer, but a choice about how you deal with insight.
2. Per user: why that model chafes with a wallboard
Most dashboard software, and most dashboards bundled with a contact centre platform, charge per user. Every person who logs in or looks on counts. That model comes from the world of reporting tools, where an analyst sits behind a screen, and there it fits. It fits a customer contact centre badly, for a simple reason: the value of a dashboard lies in how many people see it, and the model penalises exactly that.
“A wallboard hangs on the wall and the whole team looks at it. Paying per user for something everyone sees is paying for the very purpose of the thing.”
In practice it leads to behaviour nobody wants. The team leader gets a login and the agents do not, so they cannot see the queue. The manager at the other location does not get an account because it costs extra, so they manage on a weekly export. And as the organisation grows the bill grows with it, while the dashboard stays the same.
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3. Per dashboard: how it works
The alternative is paying per dashboard, not per user. Whether three or three hundred people look on makes no difference to the price. What counts is the number of screens with their own configuration. Effecta Connect works this way, and the definition is deliberately simple:
- A dashboard is a screen with its own set of widgets and data. The patient contact centre’s wallboard is one. The management screen covering all locations is one.
- The same dashboard on ten screens is one dashboard. If the wallboard hangs in three departments and home workers follow it on their laptops, it is still one.
- A dashboard with different data for a different department counts as a new dashboard. The cardiology outpatient clinic and a municipality’s citizen contact centre (KCC) each need their own screen, so that makes two.
- Who looks at it is up to you. You manage roles and permissions yourself; the number of users has no effect on the price.
The effect is that every department simply gets its own screen, and the budget becomes predictable: the number of dashboards only changes when you add a department, not when a colleague joins.
4. The hidden costs
The licence is the visible part. Below are the items that are often missing from a quote, and how the two models behave on each.
| Cost item | Per user | Per dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Team growth | Every new employee increases the bill | No effect |
| Another department wants a screen too | Extra users, often a higher pricing tier | One more dashboard, nothing else |
| Changing a widget or threshold | Often a ticket with the supplier, sometimes additional work | Yourself, in a no-code editor |
| Adding a second data source (chat, planning, SQL) | Often not possible, or a separate module | One integration, visible in existing dashboards |
| Migration to another contact centre platform | The supplier’s dashboard disappears | Only the integration changes, dashboards stay |
That last line in particular is underestimated. A municipality that goes out to tender again in three years loses all its configuration, thresholds and team agreements with a supplier dashboard. With a system-independent dashboard, only the integration changes.
5. A hospital and a municipality as examples
Take a hospital with a patient contact centre and twenty outpatient clinics, each with its own telephone availability. The contact centre wants a wallboard, the manager wants an overview of all clinics with history, and five large clinics want their own screen showing their queue and opening hours. Charged per user, that quickly adds up to dozens of accounts, and the clinics with no budget get nothing. Charged per dashboard, it is seven screens, and it makes no difference whether two or twenty people look on at a clinic.
A municipal KCC with phone, chat, WhatsApp and a service counter is in a similar position. A wallboard per channel or a combined screen for the floor, a screen for the team leader and a quarterly overview for the municipal executive. Three to five dashboards, regardless of whether the KCC has twelve or forty employees. In total, 161 Effecta Connect dashboards are currently running at customers, with 12 integrations and more than 500 users a day. That number of users is irrelevant to the price, and that is exactly the point.
6. Administration and implementation: the item nobody budgets for
The biggest hidden cost is not the licence but time. Who sets up the dashboards? Who changes them when a queue is added or an outpatient clinic changes its opening hours? If that has to go through the supplier, it does not happen, or it happens at an hourly rate. So choose a dashboard the team leader can change themselves: dragging widgets, setting thresholds, adding a widget to ten dashboards at once.
The same goes for implementation. At Effecta, a project starts with a demo and a Proof of Concept on your own environment, which you test for a few months without obligation. If you go ahead, we offset the implementation costs of the Proof of Concept against the contract. What IT needs for this is set out on the page for IT; it is usually arranged in an afternoon.
7. How to compare fairly
Ask every supplier for the same sum: the total cost over five years for the number of dashboards you need, with the number of people you expect in five years, including integrations, implementation, administration and what it costs to stop. Then ask what happens if you add a department, want another data source or migrate to a different platform. The answers to those three questions tell you more than the licence price.
Want to know what that means for your organisation? Take a look at Effecta Connect Dashboards and request a price indication based on your own number of departments, or book a demo and see in half an hour how a dashboard works on your own environment. Not there yet? Start with the Real Contact Scan.