Why Priority Matters

Your support queue has 15 messages. One is "your payment system is down and I can't check out." Another is "do you have a dark mode?" Without priority scoring, they look the same in your queue. First in, first out.

With priority scoring, the payment system message gets flagged as critical and triggers an immediate Slack notification. The dark mode question sits in the queue for your next batch review. The customer with the real problem gets helped in minutes instead of hours.

The Four Priority Levels

A good priority system has four levels:

Critical: System outages, payment failures, account lockouts, data loss. These need immediate attention regardless of the time. Trigger phone notifications.

High: Billing disputes, security concerns, broken features that affect the customer's workflow. Handle within 1 hour during business hours.

Medium: Refund requests, account changes, upgrade/downgrade requests. Handle within 4 hours.

Low: Feature requests, general questions, feedback, documentation requests. Handle during your next batch review.

Setting Up Priority Scoring

Step 1: Enable priority classification. This adds a second model pass to every incoming message. The first pass identifies intent; the second pass scores urgency.

Step 2: Create priority-based rules. In addition to your intent-based rules, add priority overrides:

• Any message with `critical` priority: Immediate Slack notification to the founder or on-call person, regardless of intent
• Any message with `high` priority: Post to a high-priority Slack channel
• `medium` and `low` priority: Follow normal intent-based routing

Step 3: Set up notification channels by priority:

• Critical: Push notification to your phone + Slack DM
• High: Slack channel for urgent items
• Medium: Standard support queue
• Low: Batch review queue

Combining Priority With Intent

The most effective routing uses both intent and priority together:

This matrix gives you granular control. A critical bug and a minor bug get different treatment even though they share the same intent.

How Priority Scoring Works

The priority model reads the message and considers signals like:

• Emotional intensity: "HELP my account is locked and I have a presentation in 30 minutes" reads as critical
• Business impact: "We can't process orders" implies revenue loss
• Urgency language: "immediately", "urgent", "emergency", "right now"
• System keywords: "outage", "down", "broken", "error"

It does not just match keywords. It understands context. "Can you help me understand why the button is broken?" is different from "The entire checkout is broken and we are losing sales RIGHT NOW."

The Cost of Priority Scoring

Priority scoring is typically an add-on: $0.03 per message. For 500 messages/month, that is $15. Whether it is worth it depends on your situation:

Worth it if:

• You have customers in different time zones and cannot watch the queue constantly
• Some messages are genuinely urgent and time-sensitive (payment issues, outages)
• You want to sleep through the night but still catch emergencies

Not worth it if:

• All your support messages are roughly equal urgency
• You check your support queue every few hours anyway
• Your product is not business-critical for your customers

After Setup

Once priority routing is running, track your response times by priority level. Your goal:

• Critical: under 15 minutes
• High: under 1 hour
• Medium: under 4 hours
• Low: within 24 hours

If you hit these targets, your customers will describe your support as "fast" even though you are not responding to everything immediately. You are just responding to the right things immediately.