Routing on priority

Priority can drive the order work goes out in, provided something reliable sets it. That last part is the hard bit.

Priority can drive the order work goes out in, provided something reliable sets it. That last part is the hard bit.

Configure it

1. Open the queue in Admin Center.
2. Set the order to consider priority first, then age.
3. Save.

Tickets then go out highest priority first, oldest first within each level.

Priority has to be set by rules

The configuration is trivial. Making it mean something is not.

If priority comes from customers choosing it on a form, everything is urgent, and routing by priority is routing by who was most annoyed when they wrote. That is worse than routing by age, which at least is fair.

Set it from facts

Build triggers that set priority from things you can verify.

• The customer's contract tier, from an organisation tag.
• The kind of problem, from a category field.
• Whether a system is down, from the form used.
• How long it has waited, raised by an automation.

All of those are checkable. None of them depend on a customer's self-assessment.

Keep the levels meaningful

Four levels only work if they are used differently. If ninety per cent of your tickets are normal and the rest urgent, you have two levels, and pretending otherwise makes reports harder to read than admitting it.

See also

• Designing a form that helps agents and customers both
• Tags on users and organisations
• How queues work