Explore recipe: First reply time heatmap

A heatmap is a great way to see your team’s effectiveness at different times in a very compact way. If you have set up business hours in Zendesk, you can customize this report to reflect that.

Note: This heatmap displays the First reply time metric, but you can use the same approach with other key metrics such as Tickets by creation time and Solved tickets by solved time.

What you'll need

Skill level: Easy

Time Required: 15 minutes

• Zendesk Explore Professional or Enterprise
• Editor or Admin permissions (see Giving agents access to Explore)
• Ticket data in Zendesk Support

How to create the report in Explore

1. In Explore, click the reports () icon.
2. In the Reports library, click New report.
3. On the Select a dataset page, click Support > Support - Tickets, then click Start report. The report builder opens.
4. In the Metrics panel, click Add
5. From the list of metrics, choose Duration between events - Calendar hours (min) > First reply time (min), then click Apply. Explore displays the median first reply time for all tickets.
6. In the Columns panel, click Add.
7. From the list of attributes, choose Time - Ticket created > Ticket created - Day of week, then click Apply. Explore displays the median first reply time for all tickets sliced by weekday (Sunday to Saturday).
8. In the Rows section, click Add.
9. From the list of attributes, choose Time - Ticket created > Ticket created - Hour, then click Apply.
10. From the visualization type menu (), choose Table.

    

    Explore displays a table showing the median first reply times each hour for every day of the week (Sunday to Saturday).

    

    Tip: You can click the table column headers to change the default column names to shorter values.

    If you want to filter the chart to show results for a specific period, for example the year to date, click Ticket created - Hour ,then Edit date ranges.

    

11. From the calculations menu (), click Standard calculated metric.
12. On the Standard calculated metric page, click the Fields list, then choose the same metric and aggregator that you already added to the report, in this case MED(First reply time (min)).

    

13. Give the metric a name, and then click Save.
14. In the Metrics panel, click the paintdrop icon.
15. From the list of metrics, add your new standard calculated metric, which you can find in the Calculated metrics section of the list, then click Apply.

    

16. In the chart configuration menu (), click Columns.
17. On the Columns page, uncheck Fit to content.
18. In the chart configuration menu (), click Colors.
19. On the Colors page, change Color encoding to color encoding style 3. You can also click the two paintdrops to choose the colors you want to use for the lower and upper end results. You can also move the blue dot on the color range to add more contrast between the bulk of the results.