Look at three requests: one customer wants to update their profile picture. Another customer cannot complete a payment. The third says the entire booking system is down.
Before you read the words and emotions associated with each ticket, ask two questions about each request. What is the impact of this service? How urgent is the request?
This tiny comparison will show you why urgency, impact and priority are not the same thing.
Impact describes the size and gravity of the disruption.
A request has high impact when it affects many customers, a key service is unavailable or the business has stalled. High impact can occur even for a single customer if a critical task cannot be done. Examples might be a customer’s urgent booking and a client who needs to complete an important process. The size of the impact should not depend on how the customer presents it. It depends on what has actually happened, and not on the length of the ticket, for example.
Urgency refers to the time until immediate action must be taken.
Someone waiting at a desk may require a much quicker response than someone who reports a cosmetic bug that could be checked at a later stage. Urgency can increase when a customer has a deadline, or if something is at risk, or a job is blocked. Customers also might have something that needs to be done in the next few days. Words like “urgency,” “unacceptable” or “emergency” are not enough to declare that urgent. When a request is in intake, the customer service team must still ask the question: What happens if this is not done right away?
Priority is the decision you make after considering urgency and impact together.
A service interruption that has both a high impact and a high urgency would probably get into the queue sooner than a low-impact request that has no immediate deadline. This is easier to understand with a priority matrix. It could define a few levels of practical categories, such as: Critical, High, Normal and Low. It doesn’t matter which names or numbers you use as long as the system is consistent and you document why you assign a ticket that level of priority.
Newcomers will often give high priority to someone who is angry. While this may help calm down a customer conversation, it will result in an inconsistent service. Regular tickets will always be delayed and the customer support staff will not trust the priority labels. As a result, the more serious requests can also go unnoticed. You can maintain a high level of customer support and still have consistent prioritization. A customer can have a clear answer about where their request stands and what they can expect in terms of a response time. It doesn’t have to be the first in the queue.
Take five request samples, record the impact statements and urgency statements for them and decide what level of priority you should assign them. If two of these requests have the same priority, ask which request you’ll work on and write down your answer in a single line. A good way to check is if someone else can look at these facts and decide the same priority. Once you can justify a request priority without referring to the customer who was most vocal, you will be able to create a consistent service and keep the queue in good shape.
