What do the ticket priorities mean?

What do the ticket priorities mean?

Priority tells us how much your business is hurting right now — which tells us how to route the ticket.

When you submit a ticket, you can flag the priority level to give us a sense of how urgent it is. You don't have to pick one — if you skip it, our team reads the ticket and assigns a priority based on what you've described. But picking one yourself, especially when something is critical, helps the ticket route correctly the moment it hits our system. That can matter a lot when seconds count.

Here's what each level means in practice.

Critical

Business operations have stopped or are severely impacted. Work cannot continue until this is fixed.

This is the top of the ladder. Use Critical when:

  • A server is down and people can't work
  • Your point-of-sale or payment system is offline during business hours
  • You're in the middle of an active cybersecurity incident
  • Email is fully unavailable for the whole organization
  • A core line-of-business application is unreachable
  • You've lost access to client or patient data and can't operate

If you're flagging something as Critical, we also strongly recommend a phone or text follow-up to (239) 465-0079 — that pairs the structured priority signal with a human urgency signal. See how to get support or submit a ticket for the full breakdown of why this combo works best.

High

A specific person or function is significantly impacted, but the rest of the business is still operating.

This is for serious problems that aren't quite organization-wide. Examples:

  • One workstation is dead and the user can't work
  • A specific department's shared printer or scanner is down
  • A single user is locked out of email or a critical app
  • A backup failed and needs immediate attention
  • A security alert that needs investigation but isn't an active breach
  • Performance is degraded badly enough that work is being affected

High-priority tickets get worked quickly, but they don't displace Critical issues in the queue.

Medium

There's a real problem, but a workaround exists or the impact is limited.

This is where the bulk of tickets actually live. Examples:

  • A user's computer is slow but still usable
  • A non-critical app is acting up but has a workaround
  • An issue affecting one user that doesn't block their core work
  • Routine software errors that are annoying but not stopping anything
  • General questions that need a real answer but aren't time-sensitive

Medium tickets get worked in normal queue order — usually faster than the SLA would technically allow, but without the displacement priority that Critical and High get.

Low

The issue isn't significantly impacting operations. Help is needed, but work can continue.

Use Low for things like:

  • A "would be nice to fix when you have time" issue
  • A cosmetic problem that doesn't affect functionality
  • A question that doesn't have a time pressure attached
  • A request for an enhancement or improvement
  • Documentation requests, "how do I" questions, or general curiosity

Low-priority tickets still get worked — they just sit in queue behind anything more urgent.

What if you don't pick a priority?

If you submit a ticket without selecting one, we don't just default to Low and move on. Our team reads the ticket, looks at what you've described, and assigns the priority that fits. The goal is for the priority to match the actual business impact — not for tickets to languish because someone forgot to click a dropdown.

That said, if you know something is Critical, please flag it as Critical. Our triage is good, but it's faster when you've told us up front.

How priority relates to SLA

Priority is about routing — which tickets get worked first. Your service level agreement (SLA) is about commitment — the contractual response time we guarantee. The two work together: higher-priority tickets are typically held to tighter response standards in your contract, and lower-priority tickets are held to standard ones.

In practice, as we cover in the SLA article, our real-world response time almost always beats what the contract formally requires — at every priority level. The priority levels exist so we can route correctly when the queue is busy, not so we can sandbag Low-priority tickets to the last allowable minute.

The specifics of how priority maps to response time on your account are in your service agreement, which is always the source of truth.

When in doubt, pick higher

If you're genuinely not sure whether something is High or Medium, lean High. Worst case, we re-route it down a notch and move on. The opposite mistake — under flagging something that's actually urgent — is more painful for everyone, because it might sit in queue longer than it should.

We won't be annoyed if you flag something high and it turns out to be a smaller issue than expected. That happens all the time and it's part of how the system works.

The cheat sheet

  • Critical — business stopped, work can't continue → flag it and call/text us too
  • High — significant impact on a person or function, rest of the business is OK
  • Medium — real problem, but there's a workaround or limited impact (most tickets live here)
  • Low — minor issue, no rush, work can continue
  • Didn't pick one? — no problem, we'll triage it for you
  • Not sure? — lean higher

How we approach this

Priority levels are a tool, not a test. We're not grading you on whether you picked the "right" one. The whole point is to give us enough signal to route the ticket correctly so the most urgent issues get worked first. If you flag something Critical and it turns out to be Medium, no harm done. If you flag something Low and it turns out to be more serious than you thought, we'll figure that out when we read the ticket. The system is built to be forgiving — your job is just to give us your honest best guess.

Got questions?

    • Related Articles

    • How do I get support or submit a ticket?

      The easiest way? Don't. Just call us, and we'll create the ticket for you. A lot of IT companies make you jump through hoops just to tell them something is broken — log into a portal, find the right form, fill in your account info, categorize the ...
    • What is your service level agreement (SLA)?

      Because the SLA is the floor — and in practice, we clear it by a mile. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is the contractual commitment your IT provider makes about how fast they'll respond and how they'll handle issues. It's the formal, written promise ...
    • What happens if I have a technical issue?

      You let us know and we get to work — usually before you've finished explaining what's wrong. That's the short version of how this works at NerdSquad. The longer version is below, because we know "trust us, we've got it" only goes so far when ...
    • Will you come to my business to provide IT support?

      Yes — when the job calls for it, we're at your door. Most IT issues actually get resolved faster remotely than they do with someone driving across town. That's just the reality of modern support — a tech with a screen-share session and the right ...
    • Do you offer after-hours or weekend support if our office is open unusual hours?

      Yes — and "unusual" is in the eye of the beholder. We've supported practices that open at 6:30 AM, close at 9 PM, run Saturday hours, and everything in between. The 9-to-5 schedule is a marketing fiction. Real practices and real businesses keep all ...