Speed is the actual product
For inbound enquiries, tickets and applications, response time dominates almost every other variable. The constraint is rarely willingness — it is that nobody saw it, or that the person who saw it could not act.
So triage automation is not really about sorting. It is about the right person knowing within seconds, with everything they need already attached.
What the application does
- Classifies what has arrived, into your categories rather than generic ones
- Extracts the specifics — what, when, how much, which account
- Enriches from your own systems: history, status, value, previous contacts
- Routes by category, region, value or workload, with a fallback owner
- Drafts a first reply for a human to send in one click
- Escalates anything untouched after a defined period
The fallback owner matters most
Most triage failures are not misclassifications. They are items routed to someone on holiday, or to a queue nobody owns. A fallback owner and an escalation timer prevent more lost enquiries than any accuracy improvement.
Classification accuracy in practice
On well-defined categories with clear examples, high accuracy is achievable and easy to verify. Where your own team disagrees about which category something belongs in, that disagreement caps the system and is worth resolving first.
We measure per category rather than overall, because a system that is 95% accurate but wrong on your highest-value category is worse than one that is uniformly 88%.
Cost
Triage with routing, enrichment and drafting typically £15,000–£35,000 depending on how many systems supply the context and how many downstream destinations exist.