Ticket priorities

Admin › Tickets › Priorities lists the priorities a ticket can have, like Low, Medium, High and Urgent, in order of urgency. A priority decides a ticket's SLA targets and where it sorts in queues.

You can open the page with View ticket priorities. To change anything you need Manage helpdesk settings. Both are in the Helpdesk settings area of Admin › People › Roles.

Whose priorities you see#

Priorities work like statuses. A line under the description says which set you're looking at: the platform defaults, the set shared across your account, or one department's own. The first change you make copies the set into your account, or into the department you picked, and changes your copy. Facilities keeps its own priorities.

Each copy remembers the priority it was copied from, so SLA targets set on the original keep applying to it.

The list#

At the top: Search priorities... and, when you have more than one department, Department.

Columns, left to right. Select a column heading to sort by it, and Columns to show, hide or reorder columns.

• Name. With Default and Inactive badges, and the description under it.
• Order. Arrows move a priority up or down, and the number is its sort order. Pickers list priorities in this order. The arrows only work in the list's own order: sort by Order, ascending, and clear the search first. They move a priority within the page you're on.
• SLA. The fallback resolution target, like "8h", or None.
• AI criteria. What triage looks for. Hover to read it all.
• Visibility. Platform, Account (shared by your whole account) or a department's name.
• Usage. What uses the priority: tickets, routing rules, topic routes, SLA targets, macros and schoolAgent chat routes, like "12 tickets · 1 routing rule". Not used when nothing does.

Select a row to edit it. The … menu at the end of a row holds Edit and Delete.

The list shows 20 at a time; change Rows per page or move between pages at the bottom.

Add or edit a priority#

Select New priority, or select a row.

• Name. Like "Urgent".
• Description. An optional note for your team.
• Order. Lower numbers list first.
• SLA (minutes). A resolution target used only when Ticket SLAs has no resolution target for the ticket. Blank means none. 480 is 8 hours. It never sets a first-response target. Set targets on the SLAs page when you can; use this as a safety net.
• Default. Pre-selected on new tickets. See The default priority.
• Active. Inactive priorities are hidden from pickers, but tickets that have one keep it.
• AI criteria. See below.

Select Create priority, or Save changes when editing.

The default priority#

A new ticket nobody gave a priority (no person, routing rule, topic or AI triage) gets the one marked Default. With none marked, it gets the middle one in the list's order; with an even number, the later of the two middle ones. So Urgent, High, Medium and Low, in that order, gives Medium. Names don't matter: renaming a priority never changes which one is picked, and neither does its name being "Medium". Mark one Default to choose for yourself.

Which should I choose?#

• How many priorities. Four (Low, Medium, High, Urgent) is enough for most districts. Every extra level is one more row of SLA targets to set, and one more line AI has to tell apart from its neighbors.
• SLA (minutes) or the SLAs page. Set targets on Admin › Tickets › SLAs: it has first-response targets, per-type targets, business hours and escalation. Fill in SLA (minutes) only as a safety net, so a ticket still gets a resolution target if a row on the SLAs page is missing.
• Which one is the default. The level most tickets really are, usually Medium. Setting Low as the default hides real problems until someone raises them; setting High makes every ticket look urgent.
• Shared or a department's own. Keep one shared set if your departments agree on what "Urgent" means. Give Facilities its own when its levels differ, like "Emergency (safety)" and "Scheduled".

For example, a district keeps Low, Medium, High and Urgent, with Medium as the default, and writes Urgent's AI criteria as "A whole classroom, a testing session or a building is blocked, or there's a safety risk." A ticket saying "Nobody in the 3rd-grade wing can print" comes in as Medium; one saying "State testing starts in 20 minutes and the lab Chromebooks won't sign in" comes in as Urgent, with a sparkle agents can point at to see why.

AI criteria#

When AI triage is on in Admin › Account › AI Features, it reads each priority's criteria and picks the one that fits a new ticket. Be concrete: who is affected, what's blocked, deadlines, safety. For example: "A whole classroom or exam is blocked, there's a safety risk, or the requester says it's an emergency."

Without criteria, triage has only the name to go on.

AI never overrides a priority a person chose, or one a rule, topic or channel set.

Delete a priority#

Deleting turns the priority off. It only works when nothing uses it: no ticket has it, and no routing rule, topic route, SLA target, macro or schoolAgent chat route sets it. The confirmation lists what still uses it. Move those to another priority first, in Admin › Tickets › Topics & Routing, Admin › Tickets › Topics & Routing, Admin › Tickets › SLAs, Admin › Tickets › Macros or Agent settings. Turning a priority off from its edit dialog follows the same rule.

A routing rule whose priority has been turned off no longer sets a priority; it still does the rest.