What Is Ticket Triage?
Ticket triage is the process of quickly assessing incoming support requests to determine urgency, category, and initial routing. Like medical triage in an emergency room, IT triage ensures critical issues get immediate attention while less urgent requests are queued appropriately.
The Triage Process
- Intake: Ticket arrives via email, form, or chat
- Assessment: Quick review of title, description, and customer info
- Categorization: Assign product, issue type, and priority
- Routing: Send to appropriate team or individual
- Priority assignment: Set urgency based on impact and business context
Triage Criteria
- Customer tier: VIP vs. standard customer?
- System impact: Single user or whole service down?
- Keywords: Security breach, payment failure, etc. = high priority
- Workaround: Is there a temporary fix?
Benefits of Effective Triage
- Prevents SLA breaches on urgent issues
- Reduces wasted time on misrouted tickets
- Improves first response time
- Balances workload evenly across teams
Manual vs. Automated Triage
Manual triage is slow and error-prone. Automated triage uses rules and AI to assign priority and routing instantly, ensuring consistency and speed.
Industry Insight
Freshdesk reports that automated triage reduces first-response time by 50% compared to manual review.
Learn Support Workflows
Explore triage concepts on Wikipedia.
How TicketingNext Automates Triage
TicketingNext uses rules and machine learning to triage tickets in seconds. See TicketingNext features or explore use cases.
Ready for faster triage? Contact our team.