Priority
How urgent a conversation is, who sets it, and when it goes back to none.
Priority says how fast a conversation needs a person. Your AI agent rates it every time it hands a conversation over, you can change it by hand, and the inbox can sort by it so the urgent work sits at the top.
It reads as five ascending bars wherever a conversation appears.
The scale
Six levels, from none to urgent. These are the definitions your AI agent rates against, so what it picks means the same thing every time.
| Level | When it applies |
|---|---|
| No priority | Nothing time-sensitive — a routine question the next available agent can take |
| Lowest | A general enquiry or feedback with no deadline |
| Low | A request that can wait a day without harm |
| Medium | A blocked purchase, order, or account action the customer is waiting on |
| High | A frustrated or repeat-contact customer, money at stake, or a same-day deadline |
| Urgent | A safety, legal, security, or fraud concern, an abusive exchange, or a customer about to leave |
The bars stay neutral through Medium and only take on colour at the top of the scale — amber for High, red for Urgent. In a list of thirty conversations, colour on every row would mean nothing stands out, so it's spent only where it changes what you do next.
Where it shows
- The conversation list — bars on the row. A conversation at No priority shows nothing at all.
- The conversation header — bars beside the panel toggle. Click them to change the level.
- The right sidebar — the Priority row in the Assignment section.
- The thread — the handover entry carries the level the AI gave at that moment, with its reason.
Who sets it
Your AI agent, at handover
When the agent hands a conversation to a person, it rates the urgency from the scale above and records why. The thread shows it as "Handed over by AI agent: …" followed by the one-line reason.
Handovers the agent doesn't judge itself — a session that ran long, or an error it couldn't recover from — take their level from the condition that caused them rather than from a fresh reading.
See AI Agent → Handover to humans for how handover conditions are configured.
You, by hand
Click the bars in the conversation header, or open the Priority row in the right sidebar. Pick any level, including No priority to clear it.
Either way the change is recorded in the thread — "Priority set to high by Megan Whitaker", or "Priority cleared by Megan Whitaker" — so it's clear who re-read the conversation and what they decided.
Sort the inbox by priority
Click the filter icon above the conversation list and choose Sort by → Priority. The most urgent conversations come first, and each level is ordered newest-first within itself.
The sort persists in the URL, so a priority-sorted view can be bookmarked or shared like any other.
When priority resets
Priority belongs to the interaction in front of you, not to the customer. It is tied to the current session, so the moment a new session starts the conversation drops back to No priority and the next handover rates it fresh. A customer who was an emergency last month doesn't come back as one today.
A new session starts — and the priority resets — when:
| What happens | Why it starts a new session |
|---|---|
| The customer messages a resolved conversation | Their message reopens it as a new interaction |
| The customer replies to a snoozed conversation | The reply wakes it early and begins a new interaction |
| A campaign message goes out to a resolved conversation | The campaign opens a fresh exchange |
| You assign a resolved conversation to a teammate | Assigning reopens it and starts the interaction they'll handle |
| A workflow's Assign to user step takes a conversation off the AI | Ownership moves from the agent to a person |
The priority is kept everywhere else:
- Resolving or snoozing a conversation — it holds its level while it sits in Resolved or Snoozed.
- A snooze timer running out — the conversation comes back exactly as urgent as it was set aside.
- Reopening from the Resolved tab by hand — the level is still there when you open it. The customer's next message is what starts the new session and clears it.
- Assigning, unassigning, or routing to a team on a live conversation.
- Taking a live conversation over from your AI agent — you keep the rating it handed you.
A reset only clears the current value. The rating the AI gave at handover stays on the handover entry in the thread, so you can still see what it judged at the time — useful when reviewing how an escalation was handled.
Related topics
- Sessions — What a session is and where one ends
- Chat sidebar — The Assignment section that holds the Priority row
- AI Agent — Configure when your agent hands over
- Inbox — Views, filters, and sorting across the conversation list