It can be difficult to know which customer service requests to prioritize when you're bogged down in the day-to-day of contact centre life. However, by following a few first principles, it can be easier than you think.

Some people suggest 'first come, first serve', but that's too simplistic (and isn't really a prioritisation strategy' at all). We suggest categorising tickets in three ways: urgency, sentiment, and importance to the business.

Urgent requests are 'customer driven' in that they are requests that are time-sensitive to the customer. If a customer is about to catch a train and doesn't know where it is, you should prioritise that customer request above a refund request, for example.

Sentiment prioritisation places particularly angry or upset customers top of the list. Those customers are at a high risk of leaving you, spreading bad reviews and associating your brand with negativity, and should be prioritised accordingly.

Finally, we have 'importance to your business'. By pulling disparate data together, it's easy to see that some complaints, tickets and request topics are more closely associated with churn—i.e. a customer leaving your business never to return. Tackle those first to directly impact your bottom line.