Triage
Triage is the process of reviewing incoming support tickets to assign priority, route them to the right team, and decide what needs attention first.
The term comes from emergency medicine, where patients are sorted by urgency. In support, triage means looking at new tickets and making quick decisions: Is this urgent? Does it need a specialist? Is it a billing question or a technical one? Can it be answered with a saved reply?
Triage can be manual — an agent reviews the queue every hour and assigns tickets — or automated using rules based on keywords, customer tier, or channel. Most help desks support auto-assignment rules that do the routing automatically.
Good triage keeps the most important tickets visible and reduces the risk of high-priority issues sitting unnoticed in a busy queue. It is the decision-making step between a ticket arriving and a reply being written.