Routing

Triage is sorting incoming contacts by intent, urgency, and value before they are worked, so the most consequential conversations reach the right place first. Automated triage now performs the classification step, leaving prioritisation rules and exception handling as the main human contribution.

Business rules are the conditions that decide how a contact is prioritised, routed, or escalated. Typical rules combine customer tier, channel, detected intent, and elapsed time to determine where a conversation goes and how quickly it must be answered under the applicable service level agreement.

A queue is the ordered set of contacts waiting to be handled, usually segmented by channel, language, skill, or customer tier. Queue design determines who waits and for how long, making it one of the most consequential and least visible decisions in a support operation.

An intent is what a customer is actually trying to do, inferred from what they wrote or said rather than from the specific words used. Two very different messages can share an intent, which is why routing and automation are built on intent rather than on keyword matching.