Tags & Priority

Tags and priority are the two main ways an agent shapes the queue — both their own and the team's. They're simple on their own, but they unlock views, reporting, macros, and routing.

Tags

A tag is a label you attach to a conversation. Tags are free-form: your team defines whatever set makes sense for your business.

Common tag patterns:

• Topic — returns, shipping, billing, product-question
• Status hints — awaiting-supplier, needs-manager, escalation
• Customer type — vip, wholesale, b2b
• Outcomes — refunded, replaced, bug-report

You can apply multiple tags to a single conversation. Tags are shared across the whole organization rather than per business, can be created inline while working a conversation, and can be marked as favourites so the ones your team uses constantly sort to the top of the picker.

If you run an external help desk, tags applied in Octocom are pushed onto the corresponding ticket in Zendesk and Help Scout.

What tags unlock

Tags become powerful when you wire them into the rest of the system:

• Views — Build saved queues like "All open returns" or "Open vip conversations." See Views.
• Macros — A macro can apply a tag automatically as part of its actions, so you never forget to tag.
• Reporting — Tag-based reporting tells you what your customers actually contact you about.
• Routing — Assignment rules can route tagged conversations to the right team. This works for tags applied by the bot too: a custom action that tags a conversation before handing off has already tagged it by the time routing runs.

Tags can be applied by hand, by a macro, by an email rule, or from a bot action using the add_conversation_tag helper.

Conversation tags vs customer tags

Octocom has two separate tag systems:

• Conversation tags are attached to a single conversation. They describe this interaction.
• Customer tags are attached to a customer profile and persist across all of their conversations. They describe who the customer is — for example wholesale, vip, repeat-buyer.

Use the right one for the right job: a one-off return is a conversation tag; a customer who is permanently a wholesale account is a customer tag.

Priority

Priority lets you mark how urgent a conversation is. The options are:

• No priority (default)
• Low
• Medium
• High

Priority doesn't reorder your inbox automatically. It does two things: it's a filter you can add to views, and it's a condition assignment rules can route on — so "high priority goes to the senior team" is a rule you can write.

The standard pattern is a "High priority" view that everyone watches alongside their normal inbox, so urgent work is never buried.

When to set priority

A few useful rules:

• High — Something that needs to be handled today. Angry customer, broken order, VIP, payment issue.
• Medium — Should be handled in the next day or two but isn't a fire.
• Low — Nice-to-do; can wait. Often useful for non-customer-facing internal cleanup.
• No priority — Everything else. Most conversations live here, and that's fine.

If everything is high priority, nothing is. Use the higher levels sparingly so they actually mean something to the team.

Tags + priority + views

The three together are how a team turns "a pile of open conversations" into structured work. A typical setup:

1. Tag conversations as they come in (manually, via macro, or via automation).
2. Mark anything urgent as High priority as you triage it.
3. Build a small set of shared views that filter by tag and priority.
4. Each agent works their views top to bottom.

Once this is in place, the inbox stops feeling like a firehose — it's just a few queues, each with a clear definition of what belongs in it.