Define “Urgent”

I work in IT and I assist in tracking down issues and correcting them from various departments. The tickets are coded in priority from low to urgent, meaning that business is stopped.

I get an urgent ticket from the call center, which typically means phone lines are down, so I stop what I am doing to look at it. The request states that eighty calls in the past month have been routed incorrectly for [Product]. This needs to be researched and corrected immediately.

Eighty calls? I pull up how many calls this product receives each month: over 35,000.

I close the ticket and respond.

Me: “I show that members have the ability to select in the phone tree which department they wish to reach. If eighty members out of 35,000 calls reached the incorrect department — which is less than 0.23% of the call volume for [Product] — I would recommend that we put this in the monthly bulletin as a success case and see if we can get the same percentage in our other products. Thank you for sharing the good news with the IT department as, typically, we only see Urgent tickets for escalated items such as the phone system down in the call center.”

Sadly, it was not in the monthly bulletin, but it was brought up in my one-on-one with my manager to not copy the entire department on ticket responses.