Ticket Triage That Holds Up
Triage is the ten minutes that decides whether the next eight hours go well. Most teams do it implicitly and inconsistently.
What triage actually decides
Four things, and only four. Anything else belongs to whoever picks the ticket up.
That last one is the step most teams skip, and it is the one that saves the most time.
Who should triage
The two models that work are a rotating triage shift, or everybody triaging as they pick up.
A rotating shift is better above about eight agents: one person owns the front of the queue for a morning, which makes consistency possible and gives everyone else uninterrupted time.
What does not work is nobody owning it. Then triage happens by whoever opens a ticket first, and priority means whatever that agent thought at the time.
Prioritising without inflation
Within a year of launch, most queues have everything marked high. The fix is defining priority in terms somebody can check.
Write those definitions down, then audit a sample monthly. Priority that nobody defends stops meaning anything.
The duplicate check
Add one question to your triage checklist: is this the same request as something already open?
Done by hand it catches the obvious pairs, same person, same wording, minutes apart. It misses the cross-channel ones, the differently worded ones and the two-colleagues-at-one-company ones, which are the expensive kind.
Done automatically it catches all of them before triage even starts, which is the version that actually shortens the queue rather than reorganising it.
Frequently asked questions
How long should triage take per ticket?+
Thirty seconds. If it takes longer, you are solving rather than triaging, which blocks the queue behind you.
Should triage answer easy tickets?+
Yes. If it can be resolved in two minutes, resolve it. Routing a two-minute ticket costs more than answering it.
How do we stop priority inflation?+
Write checkable definitions and audit a sample monthly. Priority without enforcement drifts upward every time.
Take the duplicates out before triage
A queue with a tenth fewer tickets is a queue your triage shift can actually keep up with.
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