Connect to IntercomTicket Triage
Ticket Triage is the process of sorting, categorizing, and prioritizing incoming support requests immediately upon receipt — before assignment to an agent for resolution. Effective triage ensures the right ticket reaches the right agent (or team) with the right priority, minimizing the time between ticket creation and appropriate handling. Poor triage is one of the most common causes of SLA breaches: tickets that sit uncategorized in a general queue often age out before anyone with the right skills sees them.
Time to Triage = Timestamp of first categorization/priority assignment − Ticket creation timestamp
Triage time measures how quickly a ticket moves from "created" to "assigned with correct priority and routing." Track as an average across all tickets and segment by channel. Manual triage takes longer; AI-assisted auto-triage can bring this to near-zero for standard ticket types.
B2B SaaS, time-to-triage targets
- 1Skipping triage under high volume — pressure to "just reply" causes teams to skip proper categorization, making downstream reporting and routing unreliable.
- 2Using too many categories — a triage taxonomy with 50+ tags produces inconsistent tagging and unusable data. Start with 10–15 top-level categories.
- 3Not reviewing triage accuracy — periodically audit whether tickets triaged as "billing" actually contain billing issues. Inaccurate triage corrupts every report built on top of it.
- 4Treating triage as an admin task rather than a strategic one — triage data feeds product roadmap prioritization, staffing decisions, and knowledge base investment. It deserves ownership.