Question
Which time zone does Insights use?
Answer
In Insights, there are three different time zones that apply in different situations:
- Your local time
- Any times displayed in the interface, like the data sync times under the Manage tab.
- Private emails that are scheduled directly from a dashboard.
- Your Support account's default time zone
- Date attributes in reports. If you filter for a certain date, Insights will display results from midnight to midnight of the account's time zone.
- Daily sync time for Professional accounts.
- Pacific Standard Time
- Global scheduled emails.
It is important to have some set standards for analytics. You can drastically change the results in a report by using a different time zone to determine the date. At best, that would lead to discrepancies based on who ran each report. At worst, it would undermine the integrity of your data and reporting.
To avoid those integrity problems, GoodData uses the account default time zone for report data. For convenience, it tries to present your local time whenever possible in the user interface.
The odd exception is the Pacific Standard Time for global emails. This is because Insights is managed by Zendesk, and Zendesk is based in San Francisco. Zendesk does a lot of work to maintain the data model, connectors, user provisioning, authentication, and other back-end functions. Global scheduled emails are included with those functions, and there isn't a way to adjust them separately without impacting the rest of the project.
9 Comments
Is there an option to report on a different time zone as well? For example, we have an offshore team and we want to make sure we can get the correct data for their work.
Hi Janice!
Do you mean that you want to be able to isolate that team's work into a single report, or filter it out?
As a followup to Janice's comment, we would like some users to be able to read reports in Insights based on one timezone, while other users can check reports based on another.
For example some of our agents are handling tickets in Mexico City, some are handling tickets in Sydney while the majority are handling tickets in Estonia. We need to be able to dynamically switch the reporting timezone per Insights viewer, otherwise it is very difficult to understand the reported timestamps which appear sometimes on the incorrect day.
Is there no way of reporting in the local user time? This is pretty essential, especially if using zendesk talk. How are call center supervisors supposed to look at important metrics such as call volume per hour if it’s not in their time zone? Makes Zendesk Talk redundant for companies with call centers across timezones.
Hi Mark! At this time, there is no way to change the timezone Insights uses for reports. Results will always be displayed based on the timezone of the account, not the individual user.
Timezones are enormously complicated to implement in historical analytics. On the technical side, the simplest approach is to save raw data in a standard timezone (like UTC), then convert based on the user's local timezone. The biggest issue with that approach, though, is daylight savings time. The current timezone offset won't be accurate on the other side of the daylight savings time boundary, and the boundaries vary by timezone and year. Throw in the occasional leap year, and there isn't an efficient, procedural way to convert historic data with respect to current local time.
On the practical usage side, timezones can shift results by nearly a full day. For important boundaries, like sales targets at the end of a quarter, one day can make a huge difference in reports. Any sort of timezone conversion would need to be clearly and unambiguously displayed in the results. That means significant changes to the reporting interface and report design; this type of change can't be quietly implemented on the backend.
There are definitely use cases for international teams being able to run their own reports in their own timezones. There aren't any changes planned for Insights right now, but we're aware that this is a pain point. Our data team is looking at expanding these features for future analytics tools.
Happy reporting!
I've just set up an addtional time zone for our Canada agents. Assignment of this time zonse is based on group of users. How this will be mirrored in Insights/Good Data reports? I mean, We use a metric First Reply Time of 8.5 hours - do I need to somehow adjust reports, or will the metric be calculated for appropriate time zone automatically? Not sure if I'm clear enough... :) Thanks in advance for help!
Hi Jagoda! For business hours metrics, like [Biz Hrs] First Reply Time, Zendesk uses the schedule that is active on the ticket at the time of the reply or solve. This means you can see results in business hours for any schedule or time zone, as long as you have those schedules configured in Support and set them on tickets.
SLAs with targets in business hours will also use the schedule on the ticket. You don't need to change the SLA policy or reports; you just need to set the schedule.
You can learn more about schedules in this article: Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays.
Within Insights, date attributes like Date (Ticket Created) will always use midnight to midnight in the time zone of the account. Those won't change for different users or time zones.
I hope this helps! Happy reporting!
Awesome, thank you Amy!
Hi Priya,
There are two different timezones in Explore that display based on different situations. You can find more information on this in the following article: Which time zone does Explore use
Hope this helps!
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