Appearance
Overview
Triage reads each new conversation and tags it in your help desk with its type, its urgency and the product it is about. Your queue is sorted before anyone opens it, so your team can pull up the urgent bugs or the billing questions with the views and filters they already use.
How it runs
The Auto-triage job runs every 6 hours. Each run looks at up to 20 of your most recently updated open conversations, shared across your connected help desks, classifies the ones not triaged yet, and adds the tags straight to each conversation.
Triage runs on your Anthropic API key and starts once that key is saved. It does not need a documentation source. It works in the inboxes named in Allowed inboxes, and in every inbox while that field is empty. See Allowed inboxes.
Overdesk triages each conversation once. It keeps its own record of what it has classified, so removing the tags in your help desk does not make it classify the conversation again. A conversation that already carries a type:, urgency: or product: tag, from your team or anyone else, is left alone.
Overdesk adds its tags beside the ones already on the conversation and leaves your own tags in place.
What each tag means
Type:
| Tag | Added when the conversation is |
|---|---|
type:bug | About something broken: an error, a crash, a conflict, a feature not working |
type:how-to | A setup, configuration or "how do I" question about using your product |
type:feature-request | A request for something new or an improvement |
type:billing | About a refund, payment, license, subscription, pricing, invoice, cancellation, chargeback or dispute |
A conversation that fits none of these gets no type tag. A request whose real purpose is money or legal, such as a refund or a "delete my data" request, is never tagged type:how-to, even when the customer phrases it as "how do I".
Urgency:
| Tag | Added when |
|---|---|
urgency:high | The customer's site is broken or down, data has been lost, a paying customer is clearly frustrated, or they have followed up several times |
urgency:medium | Something is not working but there is a workaround, or it is a standard support question |
urgency:low | It is a feature request or a general question with no time pressure |
Product:
| Tag | Added when |
|---|---|
product: followed by the name | The conversation is about a specific product. With no identifiable product, there is no product tag |
If you have Freemius connected, triage uses your product names exactly as they are spelled in Freemius, so each product you sell there always gets the same tag. See Freemius.
Where the tags are used
- Drafting works through the most pressing conversations first, and
urgency:high,urgency:medium,type:bugandtype:billingall move a conversation up the list. See Drafts. - Several guardrail rules read them: Billing matches
type:billing, Bug reports matchestype:bug, and the urgency gates match on urgency. See Rules.
Other tags Overdesk adds
Triage is not the only job that tags conversations. You may also see:
| Tag | Added when |
|---|---|
ai-reply | Overdesk drafted a reply on the conversation |
ai-followup | Overdesk drafted a follow-up nudge. See Follow-up nudges |
ai-closed | Overdesk closed the conversation as stale. See Closing stale conversations |
ai-good, ai-edited, ai-bad | Overdesk graded its draft against the reply your team sent. See Reviewing drafts |
One tag works the other way round: add waiting-for-release to a conversation and follow-up nudges leave it alone.
Help desks without tags
FreeScout keeps tags in a separate module. Without it, triage still classifies each conversation and records the result in Overdesk, but no tags appear on the conversation.
Turn it off
Pause the Auto-triage row on Schedules. Pausing drafting on Guardrails does not stop triage.