A common use of automation is to set the urgency score on tickets, to help agents decide which ones to deal with first.

Urgency is a score from 1 to 10. For a newly created ticket, it defaults to 1. Agents can change the urgency score manually.

Actions can be used to increase or decrease urgency by a certain amount, instead of setting it to a particular value. This allows a number of different automated rules to affect urgency, giving a combined score based on various factors.

For example, suppose your organization wants to encourage agents to prioritize tickets from the VIP usergroup, and to prioritize support department tickets over sales department tickets.

You could set a trigger to increase the urgency for new tickets from the “VIP” usergroup by 6, and a second trigger to decrease the urgency for new tickets in the “Sales” department by 3.

A new “Support” ticket from a VIP would start with urgency 1, get +6 urgency from the first trigger, for an overall urgency of 7.

A new “Sales” ticket from a VIP user would start with urgency 1, get +6 from the first trigger, then -3 from the second trigger, for an overall urgency of 4.

Urgency can never go below 1 or above 10. If an action would decrease a ticket’s urgency to below 1 or above 10, it will be set to 1 or 10 respectively.

You can view the distribution of urgency values for your current unresolved tickets under Tickets > Urgency.