A support inbox that sorts itself

Research

I shadowed eight agents at three customer companies through a Monday morning shift. On average, they spent 40 minutes of the first two hours sorting rather than replying. Every team had invented rules, written on sticky notes, about which agent handled which topic.

I copied every sticky note I found into a spreadsheet, 64 in total, and grouped them. Almost all of them were one of four kinds of rule: by topic, by language, by customer size or by who had spoken to the customer before.

Decisions

We turned those sticky notes into routing rules that a team lead can set up in plain sentences: when the subject mentions refund, assign to Ana. New tickets arrive already sorted, with a short reason shown under each one, so agents can see why a ticket came to them and correct it in one click.

The rule should read like the sticky note it replaces.

Assignment moved to a single keyboard shortcut, and the inbox gained a quiet view that hides everything assigned to someone else.

Shipping

We ran a four-week trial with ten teams. First-reply time fell by 27%, assignment dropped to one click, and nine out of ten agents chose to keep routing switched on when the trial ended.

We kept the rules visible and editable at every step. If routing made a wrong call, the agent could fix it with one click and suggest a change to the rule, so the team lead saw which rules needed work instead of guessing. Monday mornings got noticeably calmer.