Priority judgement
How should support tickets be prioritised?
By true severity: how many people are affected, whether there is a way around it, and what it stops them doing. A customer calling it urgent is information, not a priority.
- Whether the priority they set matches the true severity. A customer calling it urgent is information, not a priority. Setting everything to P1 to be safe destroys a team's SLA figures and is treated as a failure, not caution.
- One of the 11 dimensions every ticket here is graded against
What a weak answer looks like
The ways this is usually lost
Named failures rather than general warnings, because a warning nobody can recognise in their own work changes nothing.
Priority taken from the customer's tone or from how senior the sender is.
Everything marked urgent, which leaves the queue with no order at all.
A genuine outage left at a routine priority because it arrived as one quiet message.
What a strong one looks like
What the grader is actually looking for
The same ticket, done in the way that scores.
Scope established first: one person or many, and whether there is a workaround.
Priority raised on evidence, and lowered when the evidence does not support it.
Urgency the customer expressed acknowledged in the reply without letting it set the field.
Questions
Asked about this one
Is it safer to mark everything high priority?
No. It is the most common way this is lost. If every ticket is urgent the queue has no order, the genuinely severe ones are not found any faster, and the team's figures stop meaning anything.
What about a customer who insists their issue is critical?
Take it seriously as information and still set the field on evidence. Acknowledging the urgency somebody feels and recording the severity accurately are two different jobs, and both can be done in the same reply.
Related guides
- Tone & empathy
- Diagnostic quality
- Communication clarity
- SLA discipline
- Resolution correctness
- Documentation
- Judgement on the AI's suggestion
- Ticket admin accuracy
- Escalation judgement
- Technical depth
- Technical support interview questions, answered from realistic tickets
See this scored on a realistic ticket: work one free, read a worked ticket, or see what a graded record shows. Every guide is listed on the guides index, and if something here is wrong or unclear, tell us.
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