Internal operational vs customer-facing dashboards — different metrics, different success criteria, different audiences

Claim: Internal dashboards serve owners / managers / staff making operational decisions; success measured by efficient action. Customer-facing dashboards show clients their own data; success measured by retention, activation, churn deflection.

Source: Practitioner framing — synthesised from agency-analytics and embedded-analytics literature.

Confidence: Industry-consensus.

Why this matters for Candid: The two require entirely different build-vs-buy decision trees. Internal: default to cheapest BI tool (R2 — For internal dashboards, default to the cheapest tool that fits the existing stack: Power BI Pro for M365 shops, free Looker Studio for Google/marketing data, Metabase for SQL-comfortable / future-embedding). Customer-facing: default to PDF/link before embed (R3 — For customer-facing reporting, default to the lightest delivery first: scheduled PDF or shared reporting link; embed only when the four-condition narrow band holds).