Prior Period Comparison

What it's for

A metric on its own tells you where you are, not whether that's normal. Volume is up - compared to what? Handle time dropped - is that the coaching program working, or just a quieter week? Without a reference period, every number invites a guess.

Prior Period Comparison puts the reference period directly on top of the current one. Instead of exporting two date ranges and lining them up yourself, you pick both periods once, and every chart and metric card answers the comparison for you: Period 1, Period 2, and the delta between them. Because it's an overlay rather than a separate report, you keep all your existing filters, groupings and views - you're comparing like for like on the exact slice of the operation you were already looking at.

How to use it

1. Activate Prior Period Comparison from the Widgets menu in the bottom bar.
2. Set your two periods. Each can be a single day or a custom range, with all-day or time-bounded windows.
3. To shift the second period, click and hold the compare date displayed on the left-hand side.

Choosing your periods

Pick two comparable periods for the cleanest read - month vs month, day vs day, week vs week. You can compare unequal periods (for example, a 28-day month against a 31-day month), but volume metrics and the Overtime view won't be a fair comparison - averages will still hold up. If your two periods differ by more than 48 hours, a warning will appear; you can still proceed past it.

What changes across the page

• Metric cards: split into Period 1, Period 2, and a delta - across every metric, including volume, handle time, predicted resolution, sentiment, workload, interaction cost, and satisfaction. This split is also exportable to .csv.
• Metric chart: grouped bars show both periods per dimension.
• Overtime chart: both periods overlaid as separate lines.
• Change chart: a delta view underneath shows the gap between periods at each point in time.

It works with your existing view - Root Causes, Enquiries, Sub-Enquiries, Teams, Agents - so the comparison respects whatever filters you already have applied.

Use cases

Compare a day against the same day last week

Monday looks rough - volume is spiking and sentiment is down. Overlay it against last Monday and you'll know within seconds whether this is a genuine incident or just what Mondays look like. The delta chart shows exactly which hours diverged, so you can pull transcripts from the window where things actually changed, rather than trawling the whole day.

Validate a change month over month

You rolled out a new IVR flow, a coaching program, or a deflection initiative at the start of the month. Compare this month against last and the metric card deltas give you the headline movement on every metric at once, while the overlay shows whether the improvement built over the month or landed on day one. Export the split and the before/after story goes straight into your stakeholder update.

Separate seasonality from real change

Some months always look worse than others - school holidays, end of financial year, billing cycles. Comparing this month against the same month last year removes the seasonal noise and tells you whether the operation is genuinely improving year on year. A metric that's up on last month but down on the same month last year is a very different conversation, and this view makes that distinction hard to miss.

Want to see more? 

See Insights #10 to view Prior Period Comparison across demand or Insights #11 to see it across agents & teams in OI University.