Working with times and dates in Virtual Agent Analytics: Your questions answered

By Sean Pearson, Chatbase Customer Success Team

At Chatbase it's common for us to get questions about how our services work and how to get the most out of reports. Many of these questions involve working with times and dates in Chatbase Virtual Agent Analytics, so we’ve selected a few of the most popular issues in those categories and provided responses below. We hope they contribute to a healthy, happy virtual agent or bot in 2019!

How do I get the most out of custom date ranges in my reports?

We’ve recently updated the functionality of our graphs for improved readability when selecting custom date ranges. If the selected range is shorter than 4 days, the X-axis will display hourly granularity for all Monthly, Weekly, and Daily metrics. If your selected range is 4 days or more, the X-axis will display daily granularity for your metrics.

It is important to note that the Monthly, Weekly, and Daily counts on the right side of the report represent a rolling window looking back from the last date in your selected date range. In the example below, note the slight variation in the summary numbers reported in the data point for 1/7/19: The counts for the individual hourly/daily nodes represent a rolling window going back from that specific hour or day.



Here is an example of the graph in the < 3-day date range configuration:


Do I need to configure my timezone?

No, Virtual Agent Analytics automatically determines correct timezone via your web browser. Calibrations are made on the fly to determine the appropriate buckets for your monthly, weekly, and daily metrics based on your relation to GMT. For example, since Chatbase is located in the PST (UTC -8) timezone, our processing day ends at 16:00 PST (00:00 GMT).

There is currently no mechanism for manually adjusting your timezone.

What data do predefined date ranges include, specifically?

  • Today: Includes metrics up to current hour
  • Yesterday: Includes metrics from previous processing day
  • This week: Includes metrics for current calendar week from Sunday-Saturday
  • Last 7 days: Include metrics for 7 calendar days but only 6 processing days. Because the session card will aggregate 6 days of data, however, the weekly summary metrics on the right of the AUG will show 7 days of data.
  • Last month: Skips first day of range (starts on the second day of the month)
  • Last 30 days: Skips first day of range (selects 29 days, not 30)
  • Quarter to Date: Skips first day of range

I'm having trouble locating an utterance in Transcripts, what can I do?

If you are having that issue with Transcripts, it might be because the date range you have selected is too broad. Upon loading Transcripts, up to 20 transcripts associated with the selected intent are paginated for viewing. Once you click through the first 20, another 20 random transcripts are selected and displayed, some of which could potentially be the same as the first batch. For this reason, we suggest narrowing the date range so that the count for the selected intent is not much more than 20. This will help ensure that you are seeing all the transcripts that occurred during that time period.

Send more questions!

If you have other questions about working with times and dates in Virtual Agent Analytics, send us a note via chatbase-support@google.com or post your question with the "chatbase" tag at Stack Overflow.

About Chatbase
Chatbase is a cloud service for more easily building, analyzing, and optimizing AI-powered customer service virtual agents. Powered by Google's machine learning and search capabilities, the Chatbase approach is faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive than manual methods, helping contact centers deploy a virtual agent that improves customer satisfaction in a fraction of the time. Chatbase is brought to you by Area 120, an incubator operated by Google.

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