Get more from the analytics!

[AndrewNYC]

I'm intrigued by some of the analytical data on response times. The analytics screen does a good job of providing the big picture and I wondered whether we could see the detail next to the sender's profile.

Specifically, I would be interested to know how long, on average, it takes me to respond to that person (gives me a target to improve upon, particularly if I'm not being as responsive as I should be) and also to know how responsive that person is to me (sets a level of expectation for emails that I send!)

Does that sound like it might be useful to others?

[gary]

Doesn't it do that already? If you go in to the Analytics and select Response Times, it will show you the Median Delay of Response. Or are you saying you'd like to see this information in the Xobni sidebar along with the other information about the individual?

-Gary

[AndrewNYC]

Yes, you've hit the nail on the head.

The analytics dashboard is great as it is; I'm just talking about making some of that available in the context of the email you're looking at; i.e. showing response data for that email author in the sidebar.

Also, I think, if I understand the analytics report correctly, the analytics grid is showing my median response time to a correspondent's email. I don't know what that correspondent's median response time is to an email that I send.

I realise that there's a limited amount of real estate in the sidebar and there are already some useful suggestions about expanding the visible contact information based on the email author's Outlook contact record.

However, it seems that Xobni provides some really useful analytical data about the email habits of the user and the user's correspondents and it would be nice to see some of that presented in the context of the email you're looking at rather than having to go to the analytics grid to get it.

[gary]

Okay...understand what you're looking for now.

You're correct. The analytics are showing your response time. I think that determining the amount of time it takes a correspondent to respond may be a little trickier...how do you judge when they responded? If you're using Outlook with an Exchange server, is it when the email was received by the server? Is it when it was received by Outlook? Is it when you read it? What if you're not using Exchange and popping instead?

Not saying it can't be done, or that it might not already be in the works...just some things to think about.


-Gary

[AndrewNYC]

Yes, I agree it's a little tricky.

It seems logical, however, that you shouldn't penalise the respondent for network latency so you should use the "Date" header, which is when the sender actually hits the send button, or, at worst, the lowest "Received" header in the bang path (to use the old school jargon).

To be honest I haven't quite figured out how the current response times are calculated. There are, as you point out, a number of timestamps on the incoming email but the difference between those and the sent time on my response isn't the same as the Xobni-calculated Response Time.

[Sonrisante]

I like the idea of allowing me to choose in the OPTIONS which analytics graph to show for the contact. I really don't care much about the time of day email is received. But there are other analytics that I would like to have there instead. Instead of showing a bunch of different graphs (which is what I think Gary was suggesting in answer to AndrewNYC's request), how about allowing me to choose from a set of analytics that are contact centric?