Priorities are an alternative way to record how important it is to answer a certain ticket.

Priorities differ from urgency in the following ways:

• Priorities are an ordered set of named values defined by you, e.g. ‘Routine’, ‘Urgent’, ‘Critical’, whereas urgency is a numerical score from 1 to 10.
• Actions from triggers, SLAs, macros and escalations cannot increase or decrease priority; they can only set a particular priority value. In contrast, you can have an action that increases or decreases urgency by a set amount.
• Priority can be seen and set by users, whereas urgency is only ever visible to agents.

Priorities can be useful when the service you offer has different tiers. For example, suppose you offer a service plan where you allow users to declare a certain number of ‘Critical’ tickets, which you guarantee to answer faster than normal tickets.

You could implement this in Deskpro by setting ‘Critical’ as a priority, allowing users to select it when they submit a ticket, and then defining an SLA that is applied to tickets with ‘Critical’ priority.

As with all custom fields, you can control which departments the priority field is displayed in with the Ticket form layouts editor.

To create priorities:

1. Go to Tickets > Fields and make sure that the Priorities switch control is on.
2. Click Priorities, fill in the name of the priority you want to create in the Enter a title... box, and click Add.
3. Repeat until you have made all the priorities you want.
4. Drag priorities by the handles at left to order them, from the least important at the top to the most important at the bottom.

The order of priorities is used:

• when displaying them to users/agents
• to enable agents to order tickets by ascending or descending priority in the list pane