Analytics · Heatmaps

See exactly when your customers actually talk to you

Staffing, broadcast pacing and SLA windows all hinge on knowing when traffic happens — by hour, by day, by channel, by segment. SabNode Activity Heatmaps render the answer in a single glance. Decide your shift roster, your broadcast launch time and your SLA thresholds on real data instead of folk wisdom.

  • Hour × day grid for every channel and segment
  • Inbound volume, response time and resolution
  • Compare current week to a baseline
  • Drive staffing, SLA and pacing decisions
The problem

Operational decisions made on folk wisdom

Every support and growth team has a "we think Tuesday afternoons are busy" theory. Most of the time it is wrong, or right only in aggregate, or right last year but wrong now because customer behaviour shifted after the festive season. The result is a roster that has too many agents at 11am and too few at 8pm, a broadcast launched at 10am because that is when the marketing lead arrives at the office, and an SLA of "respond within 4 hours" set without checking when customers are actually waiting.

The data is there — every inbound message, every reply, every resolution is timestamped — but it is locked inside a spreadsheet nobody runs. When the question comes up ("should we add a night-shift agent?", "when should we send the festival broadcast?"), the analysis takes a week and the decision is made before the spreadsheet is finished. The team falls back to gut feel, the gut feel turns out to be wrong in a way that costs money, and nobody learns anything because there is no closed loop.

A heatmap closes the loop. One glance shows traffic by hour and day, by channel, by segment. The decision — when to staff, when to broadcast, what SLA to set — gets made on Monday morning in two minutes instead of a week. The next week, the heatmap reflects the impact of the decision, so you can tell whether moving the broadcast from 10am to 8pm actually changed read rate. This is operations grounded in evidence, at the cadence operations actually moves.

What it is

Activity Heatmaps, in depth.

SabNode Activity Heatmaps render every operational signal as an hour × day grid. The default view is inbound message volume by hour-of-day and day-of-week, across all channels, for the last 30 days. From there you slice — by channel (WhatsApp, Instagram, email, web chat), by segment (paid vs free, new vs returning, by country), by team or agent, by label, by language — and the grid updates in milliseconds. Every cell is interactive: click to see the underlying conversations, hover for the exact volume, right-click to drill into the same hour on the previous month for comparison.

Beyond inbound volume, the same heatmap surface answers the operational questions that volume alone cannot. Response time heatmaps show when your agents are slowest, by hour and day, so the SLA conversation is grounded in real numbers. Resolution-time heatmaps show when chats take the longest to close — usually correlated with shift handovers and weekend coverage. Broadcast-window heatmaps show when read rates peak by segment, so the launch time conversation is settled in seconds.

Comparison is built in. Every heatmap can be overlaid with a baseline period — last week vs the week before, this month vs the same month last year, festive period vs non-festive — and the delta is rendered as a divergent colour scale. A spike in inbound on Thursday evenings that did not exist last quarter is visible immediately, and the drill-down shows you which segment caused it. Operations becomes a closed loop: notice the shift, intervene, see the impact on the next heatmap update.

Heatmaps drive other systems. The broadcast scheduler can suggest a launch window based on the read-rate heatmap for the target segment. The shared inbox can recommend a staffing pattern based on the volume heatmap for each team. The SLA configuration UI can surface "your current SLA of 4 hours is breached 22 percent of the time at 8pm on weekdays" — turning a static target into a living number. The heatmap is not a chart; it is operational intelligence.

Capabilities

Everything you get with Activity Heatmaps.

7 capabilities
01

Hour × day grid

The canonical view — 24 hours by 7 days, coloured by volume or any metric you choose. Every cell is interactive: hover for exact values, click to see underlying conversations, right-click to compare with a baseline period.

02

Channel and segment slicing

Slice the heatmap by channel (WhatsApp, Instagram, email, web chat), segment (paid vs free, by country, by language), team, agent, label or campaign. Every dimension updates in milliseconds without page reloads.

03

Response and resolution heatmaps

Beyond inbound volume, render response time and resolution time as heatmaps. Surface when agents are slowest by hour and day, which usually correlates with handovers and weekend coverage gaps.

04

Broadcast pacing recommendations

Read-rate heatmaps power broadcast-window suggestions. When you launch a marketing template to a segment, the scheduler suggests a window based on when that segment historically reads messages within the first hour.

05

Baseline comparison

Overlay any heatmap with a baseline — last week, last month, same period last year. Divergent colour scale renders the delta directly so spikes and dips are visible without doing the maths in your head.

06

SLA planning surface

Heatmaps feed the SLA configuration UI. Setting a 4-hour SLA shows you which hour-day cells would breach historically, so the SLA conversation is grounded in real coverage rather than aspiration.

07

Timezone correctness

Heatmaps respect the recipient's timezone when relevant (read-rate heatmaps) and the operator's timezone otherwise (agent staffing heatmaps). No more debates about whether 8pm IST equals 2:30pm UTC; the platform does it correctly.

Use cases

Built for the way teams actually work.

E-commerce
Case 01

Support shift planning

An e-commerce support lead reads the volume heatmap and discovers a sustained spike at 9–11pm IST that was not on the roster. They add an evening-shift agent the next week and the queue-wait heatmap for that window drops from 12 minutes median to under 3.

D2C
Case 02

Broadcast launch window

A D2C beauty brand launches Marketing templates based on read-rate heatmaps per segment — 7pm IST for "metro women 25–34", 8am IST for "tier-2 men 35–45". Average read rate within the first hour improves 18 percent versus a one-size launch time.

SaaS
Case 03

SLA reset for support team

A B2B SaaS resets its support SLA after the heatmap shows 4-hour breaches concentrated at 7am UTC. They split the SLA — 1 hour during business hours, 8 hours overnight — and breach rate falls below 3 percent across the week.

Retail
Case 04

Festive season prep

A retail chain compares Diwali week volume heatmap to the same week the previous year. The 200 percent surge informs how many seasonal agents to onboard, when to onboard them and when to ramp down. The post-Diwali debrief uses the same heatmap to evaluate.

Logistics
Case 05

Multi-region operations

A logistics operator running in India, UAE and Singapore reads heatmaps in each region's timezone. Staffing patterns and broadcast schedules differ per region but each is grounded in the same heatmap discipline, surfaced in a single workspace.

How it works

From signup to first send in minutes.

Activity Heatmaps is included on every SabNode workspace. No separate billing, no extra setup — flip it on from your workspace settings.

  1. 01

    Open the heatmap

    Pick a metric — inbound volume, response time, resolution time, read rate. The default 30-day hour-by-day grid renders immediately.

  2. 02

    Slice it

    Filter by channel, segment, team, agent, label, campaign or language. Every dimension updates in milliseconds without page reloads.

  3. 03

    Compare with a baseline

    Overlay last week, last month or same period last year. Divergent colour scale renders the delta so spikes and dips are visible at a glance.

  4. 04

    Drill into a cell

    Click a cell to see the underlying conversations, messages and contacts. Jump straight to the inbox or contact view for action.

  5. 05

    Drive a decision

    Use the heatmap to set a roster, pick a broadcast launch window, define an SLA or schedule a campaign. The next heatmap update closes the loop.

Plays well with

Works with the tools you already ship on.

SlackGoogle SheetsBigQuerySnowflakeMixpanelAmplitudeLookerHubSpot
Frequently asked

Questions about Activity Heatmaps.

Can't find what you're looking for? Talk to our team.

How is this different from a regular bar chart of volume by hour?
A bar chart by hour averages across days, hiding the day-of-week pattern. A bar chart by day averages across hours, hiding the time-of-day pattern. A heatmap renders both dimensions simultaneously, which is essential because most operational decisions (staffing, broadcast timing) hinge on the interaction — Thursday at 9pm is not Friday at 9pm and not Thursday at 10am.
What timezone is used?
Depends on the metric. Read-rate heatmaps use the recipient's timezone so "best send window for Bengaluru contacts" reflects when they read messages in IST. Staffing heatmaps use the operator's timezone so the roster you build matches your shift planning. The platform handles the conversion correctly and the UI shows which timezone is in use.
Can I see heatmaps per agent?
Yes. Agent heatmaps show response time, resolution time and message volume handled by hour and day for each agent. Useful for coaching ("you slow down at 4pm — let us look at why") and capacity planning ("we need a second agent during 7–9pm"). RBAC controls who can see which agents.
How far back can I look?
Default heatmaps cover the last 30 days. You can extend the range to 90 days, 6 months or 1 year. Going further than 1 year is supported via warehouse export — analysts can render multi-year heatmaps in Looker or Tableau against the canonical event store, which contains your full history.
Does this work for very small message volumes?
Yes, with a caveat. Heatmaps at low volume (a few hundred events over 30 days) show noise more than signal — a single hour with two conversations is not a pattern. The platform surfaces a confidence indicator when the cell volume is below a threshold and recommends extending the time range so the pattern stabilises before you make a decision.
Can I export the heatmap?
Yes. Export as PNG for slide decks, CSV for finance review, or raw event export for warehouse modelling. Heatmaps are also embeddable as live links into Confluence, Notion or any dashboard tool that accepts iframes. Tokens for live links are revocable and audited.
How do heatmaps drive the broadcast scheduler?
When you launch a broadcast and pick an audience, the scheduler reads the audience's historical read-rate heatmap and suggests a launch window — for example, "send Friday 7pm IST, read rate within 1 hour averages 47 percent for this segment versus 23 percent at 10am". You can accept the suggestion or override it. Either way, the decision is grounded.
Analytics · Heatmaps

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