Currently group messages are sorted by most recent activity only. In order to satisfy better the use case of a ticketing system, it would be useful to sort messages following this criteria:
By number of replies, starting with 0 and then incrementally.
Messages with the same number of replies would be sorted by unassigned first, then alphabetical by assignee.
Messages with the same number of replies and unassigned would be sorted by oldest first.
This way, the top of the queue has always the oldest messages that haven’t been answered and neither assigned yet.
FYI, our general use case is to be very strict about archiving. If you keep your team inbox reasonably clear there is very little need for these kind of features.
Not strictly against column sorting in core, but its very rare to be needed. @carlokok do you tend to keep your “team inbox” reasonably clear as well?
We try to keep only unanaswered/open things in there. So the support box is pretty empty at most time. Sales is a different question, for sales there are a lot of things with later follow up or that take quite a few round trips before it’s “done”. There sorting would be quite useful.
Not currently no. So far it’s been quite doable, but my colleague has been complaining about the manageability of it at times, we haven’t quite come up with a good suggestion on how to make this better yet so I haven’t posted yet. I’ll ask him if he has any comments when he gets in.
Yeah, my first recommendation here would be to start using tags, they have been enormously useful for us when it comes to keeping on top of our rather large team and support boxes.
Yes, agreed, the problem is that quite often one reply is not equivalent to a case solved, some back&forth may happen and then these message threads are “in the way” of the messages that are waiting for a first reply. Some of our queues have heavy traffic and are handled by several people, and any small improvement to keep things sorted out does help.
Yes, we do, and this helps handling what has been assigned tagged and/or assigned. However, the target of this feature requests is to keep surfacing precisely the messages that haven’t been tagged or assigned yet.
An alternative option would be to tag automatically all incoming messages with e.g. unanswered, and then have people watching that tag alone. However, this option should have to be implemented as well, and it wouldn’t be perfect. I would create extra manual work and is prone to human mistakes, unless the tag can be automatically removed when a message is assigned or replied.
We believe that the sorting we are proposing here makes sense for a ticketing system where the priority is to handle incoming requests fast and not let any request fall between the cracks. If there are concerns about integrating this request in core, we would be interested in its implementation as a plugin.
Real important note here is to keep in mind that “archive” is automatic. Once a new message comes in on the topic the topic is automatically “unarchived”. “Archive” does not mean “solved” it means … get out of my way till customer replies.
We discussed this feature further in our organization, taking into account @sam’s thoughts. All things considered, we still believe that for our workflow it is valuable to offer a default view prioritizing the messages that should be handled first.
We are funding the development of a plugin doing just that, in the terms described in the first post. Once the plugin is developed, it will be available for anyone to test it and use it. And then we’ll see.
