Events, Episodes & Labels

Overview

Events

An Event is a flag you add to the Overtime chart to mark a moment in time - use it to record anything that may have changed or affected the composition of customer demand in your contact centre. For example: an outage, a campaign, a price change, a policy update.

Events have been one of our most requested features. Customers told us they wanted to:

• Track how demand shifts in response to specific events
• Explain spikes and dips without relying on memory or separate notes
• Include that context in screenshots shared with stakeholders

Creating an event

On the Insights page, find the Events metric card.

1. Click Events on the card to open the menu.
2. Search for an existing event, or click Create Event at the bottom left of the menu.
3. Give your event a name and description, then choose a start date and time. Events can be all day or set to a specific time.
4. Choose the visibility:
   • Private - visible only to you
   • Global - visible to everyone at your company using OI. During beta, only Insights Beta testing users can create Global Events, and only Admin users can create, edit or delete them.
5. Click Save.
6. Back in the Events menu, select which events you want applied to the chart.
7. Your event now appears on the Overtime chart.

Tips

• Pin an event to keep its name and/or description permanently visible - useful for screenshots.
• To edit or delete an event, click the pen icon in the Events menu.

Example use cases

• Marketing and campaigns: flag the launch of a campaign, promotion or EDM send to see the volume and topic mix it drives, and how long the effect lasts.
• Outages and incidents: mark the start of a system, network or payment outage so future you (and your stakeholders) can immediately explain the spike.
• Pricing and billing changes: flag a price rise, fee change or shift in the billing cycle date to measure the resulting complaint and enquiry volume.
• Product, policy and process changes: record a new product launch, a change to your returns policy, or a new agent script, to see whether demand moved in the direction you expected.
• Website, app and IVR changes: mark a self-service release or IVR menu change to check whether it deflected contacts, or created new ones.
• External events: flag storms, floods, public holidays, regulatory changes or competitor announcements that shift demand outside your control.
• Operational changes: note a change to opening hours, a new offshore team going live, or a training rollout, and track the impact on the reasons customers contact you.

Labels

A Label is your own way of grouping demand drivers into something meaningful to you - for example "Direct debit failure" or "Web related enquiries" - so you can filter straight back to that view whenever you need it.

Creating a label

1. Hover over a specific demand driver on a bar to open its contextual menu, and choose the create label option at the bottom of the hover menu.
2. Search for a label name. If nothing matches, create it from the search box ("search or create new").
3. Set the label's attributes: name, colour, classification layer, and visibility (private or public).

Things to know at creation

• A label locks to the classification layer of the driver you created it on - Root Cause, Inquiry or Sub-Inquiry. This can't be changed afterwards.
• Labels are private to their creator by default.
• On the Sub-Inquiry layer you'll see two separate icons - one for Create label and one for Create episode. Each opens its own form.
• Labels are created from the demand driver's contextual menu, not from the metric card - the metric card is where you create Events.

Adding demand to a label

• Demand is added one driver at a time as you work through the graph.
• A single classification can carry multiple labels.
• Labels support multi-selection - you can select and apply several at once.
• You can only assign demand at the label's locked layer.

Viewing and filtering with a label

• Clicking a label opens the filtered view of its demand. The view defaults to the label's designated layer, and the smart filters upstream populate accordingly.
• The metric card shows counts at the label's layer only.
• With a label active you can navigate up and down between layers to view other levels. Smart filters narrow the downstream data or limit chart visibility as you go. You can't add classification filters that contradict the label's constraints.
• Time, agent, team and similar filters can be changed freely without affecting the label.

When a label gets switched off

Changing your classification filters invalidates an active label - it will be deselected and turned off. This happens if you add an element the label doesn't include, or remove one it does.

For example: your label covers Enquiries A, B and C. If you go to the filters and add Enquiry G, the label view is removed. You'll get a warning before this happens, letting you know that applying the change will deselect and turn off the active label.

Editing and managing labels

• The owner can edit a label's name and colour, and delete it.
• Icons on the label show its classification layer and whether it's private or public.
• Everyone has their own private set of labels to view and edit.
• Label Admins can convert their own private labels to public - not another user's.
• A small "i" information icon next to an item pops up its description, so you can review what's in a list without entering edit mode.

Episodes

An Episode is a company-wide grouping of related demand - for example "New join" or "Review cover" - so everyone in the organisation views and discusses demand through the same consistent, higher-order lens.

How Episodes differ from Labels

Episodes work the same way as Labels - created from the contextual menu on a demand driver, with demand assigned one driver at a time. The differences are:

• Global only: there are no private Episodes; everyone can see and use them.
• Created and edited by Episode Admins only: the initial set is defined with your business at launch, and Episode Admins can add and edit Episodes later.
• Sub-Inquiry layer only: Episodes can only be created at the Sub-Inquiry layer. On the Root Cause and Inquiry layers the Episode creation option isn't shown at all. You can still view an Episode upwards to Inquiry and Root Cause.
• One at a time: you can have only one Episode selected at a time.

Working with an Episode

• Header tile: selecting an Episode flips the header tile to persistently display the Episode's title - for example "Credit Card Episode" - which makes it clear what everyone is looking at. Labels and Events don't do this; they behave as a standard tally.
• To exit: click the X at the top of the Episode card, where the title is listed. This works the same way as exiting Compare Mode.

How they interact

Events combine freely with Labels and with an active Episode. Several Labels can be active at once, but only one Episode can be active - and an active Episode disables Labels (not the reverse). For the full picture of what turns off what across every mode, see the Mode Compatibility Matrix article.

Want to see more?

See the Insights #17 module for Events or Insights #18 module for Episodes & Labels in OI University.