What is triage?
Triage in customer support borrows from emergency medicine: sort incoming work by urgency and complexity, then route each item to the resource best equipped to handle it. Without triage, a P1 outage waits behind a feature request and the team's median response time tells you nothing about its worst.
What gets sorted
Severity (impact on the customer), urgency (time pressure), complexity (skill needed), and channel-fit (does this belong in chat, ticket, or call). The same conversation can be high severity but low complexity, or vice versa. Each axis routes differently.
Manual vs automatic
Small teams triage manually: one senior agent sees the queue first and assigns. Larger teams add automatic rules: tag-based routing, intent-based routing, and AI-driven priority scoring. message.com supports both patterns through departments and routing rules.
Anti-patterns
Triaging everything to one queue, expecting agents to self-prioritize. Triaging by alphabetical first response (FIFO) instead of severity. Letting hot accounts skip the queue without process. Each of these turns the worst case into the median case.
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