Open a typical small business inbox on a Monday morning and the order is purely chronological. A tenant reporting water coming through a light fitting sits underneath someone asking whether the office is open on bank holidays, which sits underneath a newsletter.
Every message there is technically answered in turn. That is exactly the problem. Enquiry triage means the message that could flood a flat or leave a vulnerable customer without help gets seen first, and the gift voucher question waits a few hours without anyone being worse off.
A website receptionist is well placed to do the sorting, because it talks to the customer at the moment they write and can ask the one or two questions that separate urgent from routine. It can only sort by rules you give it, though. Most of the work in this article happens before you touch any settings.
Urgency is about consequence, not tone
The instinct is to treat angry or upset messages as urgent. That does not hold up. A furious customer whose invoice has a typo is annoyed but not in danger of anything. A calm, polite message saying "there's a slight smell of gas near the boiler, is that normal?" is the most urgent enquiry you will get all year.
So define urgency with one question: what goes wrong if no person acts on this for the next twelve hours?
Work through it with your team:
- List the last fifty enquiries you received, or as many as you can find.
- For each, write the honest answer to the twelve-hour question.
- Group them by consequence: someone could be hurt, property could be damaged, money or a deadline is lost, or nothing much.
- For each group, note the words customers actually used. Not your terms, theirs. "Leak", "dripping", "water everywhere", "ceiling bulging".
- Write the rule for each group in plain sentences, with those words included.
That list of real customer words is the most useful thing you will produce. People rarely say "emergency"; they describe what they can see.
A four-tier triage matrix
Here is an example for a property management company. Build your own version with your trade's detail.
| Tier | Test | Examples in customers' words | What the assistant does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency | Someone could be hurt right now | smell of gas, sparking socket, carbon monoxide alarm going off | Tells them to call the emergency number or gas emergency line immediately, then offers to log it |
| Urgent today | Serious damage or no heating, water or security | water through ceiling, front door won't lock, no hot water with young children | Captures address and access details, opens a ticket, triggers the urgent alert |
| Next working day | Inconvenient but contained | dripping tap, broken extractor fan, oven light out | Captures details, opens a ticket, states next working day response |
| Routine | No consequence from waiting | rent statement request, parking permit, general questions | Answers from content if possible, otherwise captures and gives normal reply time |
The emergency tier is deliberately short. The assistant is not a safety service and should not try to keep someone talking while there is a gas smell. Its job is one clear instruction.
Wording escalations so people act
Escalation wording has two jobs: get the customer to do the right thing and make sure they know what happens next. Here is how that sounds in practice:
Visitor: Hi, there's water dripping from the kitchen light in my flat, it started about 20 minutes ago.
Assistant: Thank you for telling us straight away. Water near a light fitting can be dangerous, so please switch off the electricity at the consumer unit if you can do so safely, and don't touch the fitting. I'm marking this as urgent. What's the flat address and a phone number the maintenance team can call right now?
Visitor: Flat 4, 22 Park Road. 07700 900123.
Assistant: Thanks. I've opened urgent ticket #1047 and the on-call team has been alerted. If water gets worse or you notice sparking or burning smells, call 999.
Look at what is missing: no apology paragraph, no "we value your message", no question about how they found you. Urgent conversations should be short. Save the pleasantries for the routine tier.
The safety sentence came from the property manager's own written guidance, not from the assistant improvising. Put your standard safety advice into your content, reviewed by whoever is responsible for safety in your business.
Getting urgent enquiries in front of a person fast
A ticket marked urgent in an inbox nobody checks at 9pm is not triage. The alert has to reach a human who is expecting it.
- Webhook to a chat tool. Send urgent tickets as a JSON POST into a dedicated Slack channel with notifications on for the on-call person.
- Automation to a text message. Connect the webhook to Zapier or Make and send an SMS to whoever holds the out-of-hours phone that week.
- Live takeover during duty hours. If someone is marked on duty, they can pick up the conversation from the inbox while the visitor is still there.
- A written on-call rota. Software cannot fix nobody knowing whose week it is.
In SpideyChat each of these actions is off by default and switched on per assistant, which is sensible. Enable only the ones you will actually monitor. The integrations page lists the connection options.
What happens to the routine pile
Triage creates a two-speed system, and the slow lane can quietly become a graveyard. A customer asking for a copy of their tenancy agreement is not urgent, but after a week without a reply they become a complaint.
A few habits keep routine enquiries moving. Give the routine tier a stated reply time the assistant repeats, such as "within two working days", and keep it. Name a person who clears the routine queue daily, even if it takes fifteen minutes. And look at routine questions weekly for ones the assistant could answer outright next time; a parking permit process explained once in your content is a dozen tickets you never see again. Turning unanswered questions into pages walks through that.
Your first triage session
Book forty-five minutes with whoever handles enquiries now. Pull fifty real messages, run the twelve-hour question on each, and fill in your own four-tier table with customers' real words.
Then write the emergency instruction and the urgent escalation wording, check them with whoever is responsible for safety, and add them to the assistant's content. Send yourself a test message using a customer's exact phrasing and confirm the alert reaches your phone. For trades with a heavy out-of-hours load, the burst pipe guide for plumbers shows the same approach in one specific business.