We all hate picking favorites in our personal life, making plans with one friend and having to cancel your evening with the other. But in the business world it comes with the territory, whether we like it or not. If your organization is anything like ours, you can’t always treat your clients on a first come, first served basis. When important contacts need an issue resolved, you handle their problem as quickly as possible, and then move onto the rest of your contacts. And there really is no greater example of this constant decision making process for an organization, than one who handles large volumes of e-mail everyday.

Cerb4 addresses the problem of prioritizing mail by giving you the ability to rank contacts in order of importance. The higher the rank, the more valuable it is to respond to them sooner. The general idea is, if you can quickly identify which tickets came from your most important clients, then you can easily focus your organization’s attention to replying to them first. The way Cerb4 puts all of this into action is through service levels.

Configuring “service levels” starts with creating your levels, or ranks, of importance. These levels represent your organization’s service hierarchy, the higher a name is on the list the more important it is to your organization.

To create your own service levels, click ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Service Levels’ tab, and then add your levels one by one. When you are done, change the order of the list by adjusting the”Priority’ number — ‘100′ being the most important and ‘1′ being the least. These numbers are arbitrary so just make sure they decrease in value and you’ll be fine.

As you can see the names I’ve chosen are a bit silly, you will want to pick names more meaningful to your organization. These titles were not designed to be realistic so they could clearly show the relationship between a priority number and its rank, relative to the one below it. Remember these ranks don’t have any real meaning for the Helpdesk, they are simply a reminder to your organization on what “level of contacts” to respond to first.

Now that you have your service levels ready, the last part is adding contacts from your address book to one of the levels. You can add a specific individual’s address to a service level or the client’s entire organization (all the associated addresses will inherit it). As you know there is a number of places to open a contact’s information, you could do this from the ‘address book’ or just about anywhere by clicking an e-mail address, so find an address and pick a service level from the “edit contact” window.

And that should be enough to “promote” this contact’s tickets to the head of the pack. If your contact has any open tickets the next time you go to Mail Overview, ‘Service Levels’ will appear in the sidebar with a level and a ticket count. As you start delegating more and more contacts to your priority hierarchy, you will see longer and longer prioritized lists.

Now simply have your team tackle the service levels from top to bottom, and you will be giving your most important contacts the fastest response times possible.

So moral of the story is, if your organization constantly finds itself with a “laundry list” of tickets, let service levels help you decide what to fold & put away first.

-joegeck@wgm