LiveChat coverage board for planning next week's shifts

Build me a coverage and staffing board for LiveChat that my support manager opens before setting each week's shifts. Right now we only find out we were understaffed after customers have already given up waiting, so the whole point of this app is to make the gaps visible before the schedule is written, and to let the manager act on the current shift without leaving the app.

The main screen is an hour by weekday heatmap of chat demand. Build it from Report: Total Chats using an hourly distribution, and let the manager choose the date range (default to the last four weeks), the reporting time zone, and optionally a single group or team. Each cell is one weekday and one hour of the day, shaded by chat volume, so a busy Monday lunchtime reads darker than a quiet Friday evening. Show the range and time zone in the header so nobody misreads the grid.

Lay queue pressure over that same grid. Pull Report: Queued Visitors and Report: Queued Visitors Left for the same range and distribution, and flag in red any hour where visitors abandoned the queue before being served. Abandonment by hour is the actual staffing signal, so make it the thing that jumps out: red cells for hours that lost people, with the count of visitors who left shown on the cell or in a tooltip. Let the manager set the threshold for what turns a cell red rather than hardcoding one.

Clicking any hour opens a detail panel for that weekday and hour showing chats handled, peak visitors queued, visitors who left the queue, average first response time from Report: First Response Time, and average chat length from Report: Chat Duration. That combination is what tells the manager whether the hour was genuinely short handed or just busy: long first replies plus abandonment means not enough people, while normal replies with high volume means the hour is fine. Report: Response Time is a useful secondary number if you want it in the detail panel.

A second panel shows who is actually on right now. Combine List Agents with List Routing Statuses so the manager sees each agent's name and whether they are accepting chats, not accepting chats, or offline, and show a simple count of how many people are currently accepting chats. From this panel the manager can flip any agent to accepting chats or away using Set Routing Status, without opening LiveChat. Confirm before changing someone's status, show the result inline, and refresh the panel so the change is visible immediately.

Add a "Draft next week's coverage plan" button that starts a background agent. The agent reads the same demand, queue, and speed reports for the recent trailing weeks, compares them against Report: Agent Availability to see how many agent hours were actually staffed in each slot, and works out which hours next week are likely to be short handed and by roughly how many agents. It writes a shift recommendation back into the app as a table of weekday, hour, agents currently scheduled or typically available, agents recommended, and the reason (for example: twelve visitors abandoned the queue in this hour last week with first response over two minutes). It then posts a short readable summary of the plan to the support channel in Slack using Send a Message, leading with the worst gaps rather than dumping the whole grid. Show the run's progress in the app and display the finished plan when it lands.

Save each week's plan in the General Input Database so the manager can compare what was planned against what the queue actually did. Store a row per plan (the week it covers, when it was generated, and the summary that went to Slack) and a row per recommended hour (weekday, hour, recommended agent count, the reason, and the demand and abandonment numbers it was based on). Add a view that lists past weeks and, for a selected past plan, shows the recommendation next to what actually happened in those hours once the week has passed, so the manager can see whether staffing up an hour stopped the abandonment.

Implementation notes. LiveChat reporting methods are GET requests under the Reports API that take from, to, distribution, timezone, agents, and groups as query parameters, so drive the hourly heatmap with the distribution parameter rather than fetching raw chats and bucketing them by hour in the browser. Configuration and Agent Chat methods, including List Agents, List Routing Statuses, and Set Routing Status, are POST with a JSON body even when they are reads, and an empty read takes an empty object. Authentication is HTTP Basic with the account id as the username and the personal access token as the password. Fetch the reports for a given range in parallel and cache them per range so switching between cells does not refire every request. Handle the case where reporting returns nothing for an hour by rendering it as no data rather than as zero demand, because an empty hour outside support coverage is not the same as an hour with no chats.

The audience is one support manager doing a weekly planning ritual, so favour a dense, readable single screen over multiple pages: heatmap first, live roster beside or below it, plan history reachable from the header. Make the red hours and the recommended headcount the two things a person can read in five seconds.