---
name: triage-support-tickets
category: data
description: Prioritize, classify, connect, and route a support queue using explicit customer-impact and response rules. Use when a team needs consistent ticket triage across channels, products, severities, or shifts.
---

# triage-support-tickets

Make the queue reflect customer harm and required action rather than arrival order, account prominence, or the
loudest message. Preserve enough evidence to audit every priority and routing decision.

## Inputs

- Gather the open queue, service hours, severity definitions, ownership map, incident process, and response targets.
- Confirm available signals: affected users, blocked workflows, safety or security risk, financial impact, workaround, age, and commitments.
- Identify current incidents, known issues, maintenance, and escalation contacts.

## Procedure

1. Normalize channel, customer, product, environment, time, and requested outcome without altering the source message.
2. Screen immediately for safety, security, abuse, privacy, payment, legal, or widespread-availability triggers.
3. Assign impact and urgency separately, citing the evidence used for each.
4. Connect duplicates to a canonical case or incident while retaining every customer relationship and promised update.
5. Apply the support taxonomy and note ambiguous or missing categories for later repair.
6. Route to the smallest team with authority and context to act; name an owner and acceptance deadline.
7. Send an acknowledgement appropriate to priority, including known status and next update time.
8. Flag missing diagnostic information only when it changes the next decision.
9. Review aged, repeatedly reassigned, reopened, and target-breaching cases for hidden risk.
10. Sample triage decisions across agents and customer segments to detect inconsistency.

## Boundaries

Never lower priority to protect a metric, favor a customer for an unrelated commercial reason, or close a case
without resolution evidence. Minimize private data in labels and shared views. Follow the emergency process
rather than ordinary queue handling for credible safety or security harm.

## Done

- Every active ticket has a checked impact, urgency, category, owner, and next action
- Duplicate and incident-linked cases retain customer-specific communication obligations
- High-risk and target-breaching cases are escalated according to current rules
- A review sample shows that equivalent evidence produces consistent triage decisions