Ticket Triage

Ticket triage

The job is to end threads. A reply that resolves nothing but sounds polite has cost the customer another wait and cost you another ticket. Every ticket leaves triage with a decision, an owner, and a reply that needs no follow-up to be useful.

The one rule that governs everything

Separate what the customer is asking for from what they are upset about. These are different in most escalated tickets and only one of them is fixable by the reply. Someone demanding a refund over a $9 charge after six days of silence is not telling you the price is wrong. Refund the $9 if policy allows, and flag the six days as a queue defect — those are two different actions with two different owners, and answering only the first guarantees the ticket comes back.

Procedure

1. Read the whole thread before writing anything, including the parts where the customer repeats themselves. The repeat is usually where the real complaint is.
2. Classify. Exactly one primary class per ticket: defect, how-to, billing, feature-request, abuse, or no-action. If two fit, the class that determines who fixes it wins.
3. Reproduce or state that you cannot. For anything classed defect, either name the steps that reproduce it or write "not reproduced" explicitly. Never let an unverified defect travel as a confirmed one — engineering budgets from your labels.
4. Check for the duplicate. Search the queue for the same symptom before answering. Forty tickets about one outage is one incident with forty notifications, and merging them is what makes the outage visible at all.
5. Decide the money. Apply the refund tiers in references/refund-decision-tiers.md. The decision is stated as a decision, never as "I have escalated this to the team".
6. Write the reply, one to three sentences, in the shape below.
7. Write the internal note, which is longer than the reply and carries what the reply deliberately left out.
8. Flag the pattern, not just the ticket. If the same class recurs, say so in the handoff with the count. One angry customer is a ticket; nine with the same complaint is a product decision someone else has to make.

Reply shape

• Lead with the resolution. "Refunded, you'll see it in 3-5 days." Not a preamble, not an apology paragraph, not a restatement of their complaint back at them.
• One sentence of cause, only if it is true and specific. "The charge ran twice because our retry fired on a timeout." Never "due to a technical issue" — that reads as a refusal to say, because it is one.
• No apology inflation. One "sorry", or none. Six sorries reads as insincere and invites escalation, because it signals the writer expects to be shouted at.
• State what happens next and who does it, with a real timeframe or none at all. A made-up ETA is a second ticket scheduled for the day it slips.
• Never argue, never blame the customer, never quote policy at someone as an explanation. Policy explains the decision to your colleagues; it does not console anyone. If policy forces a no, say the no plainly and say what you can do instead.

Internal note shape

Three to five lines, always longer than the reply:

• What actually happened, including the part you did not tell the customer.
• What you did, with the amount if money moved.
• The real complaint, if it differed from the stated one.
• Queue/product signal, if any, with a count.
• Expected recurrence — will this customer be back, and will others.

Hard rules

• Never invent a cause. "Unclear why, not reproduced" is a legitimate and useful internal note. A guessed cause becomes a fact the moment a second person reads it.
• Never promise a fix or a date you do not own. You can promise a reply.
• Never quote a refund amount you have not checked against the actual charge. Read the number from the record, not from the customer's message.
• An abuse classification is about behaviour, never about a customer being angry. Anger is a normal input to this job. Threats and slurs are not, and they route to a human rather than getting a drafted reply.
• Escalate rather than guess on anything legal, medical, safety-related, or involving a minor's account. Say what you are escalating and to whom.
• Do not close a ticket you did not resolve to keep a metric clean. An unresolved ticket closed is the queue lying to whoever reads it next.

Worked example

Input ticket:

Subject: THIRD time asking. Cancel my account and refund me.
Body: I cancelled in March. You've charged me twice since. Nobody has replied to
either of my emails. This is theft. Cancel it and refund both charges or I'm
disputing with my bank.

Record shows: cancellation request received Mar 4 (never processed), charges Apr 1 ($29) and May 1 ($29), two inbound emails Apr 3 and Apr 22, zero outbound.

Reply:

Both charges are refunded ($58 total, back in 3-5 business days) and the account is
closed as of today. Your March cancellation never processed on our end, and your two
emails sat unanswered — that's our failure, not a misunderstanding on your side.

Internal note:

class: billing (defect adjacent). Cancellation from Mar 4 never processed — check
whether the Mar 4 request is in the failed-webhook batch, this is the 3rd this week.
Refunded 2x$29 under tier 1 (billed after cancellation, no discretion needed).
Real complaint is the 19-day silence, not the money; she asked three times.
Queue signal: 2 inbound with 0 outbound over 7 weeks is a routing failure, not
a slow agent. Chargeback risk now near zero. Will not return as a customer.

Note what the reply does not contain: no explanation of the webhook, no ETA on the routing fix, no request that she confirm anything. Nothing is owed back from her, so the thread ends.

Handoff

Return, in this order: the queue counts by class, every defect with reproduced/not reproduced marked, money moved with a total, the tickets needing a human and why, and the patterns with counts. If a single ticket was asked about, return the reply, the internal note, and the decision, and nothing else.

See references/refund-decision-tiers.md for the money decision, which is the only part of this skill where guessing is expensive in both directions.