Tender doesn't ask customers to pick a priority when they write in, and that's on purpose.
Why there's no priority field
When customers choose a priority, almost everyone chooses the highest one. That's understandable: nobody wants their problem to look unimportant. But it means the field stops telling you anything, and the genuinely urgent request (the site is down, a payment failed) looks the same as a forgotten password. Each extra field on the form also makes it a little harder to ask for help.
So rather than asking customers to rank themselves, Tender lets your team decide what's urgent, quietly, using queues and filters.
Triage with queues and filters
A setup that works well for many teams:
- Create queues for the way you work. For example "Urgent", "Reply within a day", "Bugs", "Billing" or "Key accounts". Customers never see queue names. See How do I create a Queue?
- Let filters do the first sort. A discussion filter can put new discussions into a queue by category, by sender, by company or by words in the subject or message: everything from your biggest customers into "Key accounts", say, or anything mentioning "invoice" into "Billing".
- Have someone triage the rest. Whoever is on duty reads new discussions as they arrive and adds them to the right queue, or assigns them to a teammate. See How do I assign discussions to Support Staff?
- Let each person follow their queues. Supporters can be emailed whenever a discussion lands in a queue they care about, and the dashboard sidebar shows how many open discussions each queue has.
Categories and queues do different jobs: categories are what customers choose when they write in (Problems, Questions, Billing), while queues are your team's own way of sorting the work. Each category can also have its own email address, so a separate address for, say, billing questions lands in its own category; see Setting up email.
If you want response-time targets for some queues, agree them as a team. Tender's reports show how quickly you've been replying.