What is feedback triage?

What does triage mean for customer feedback?

Triage comes from emergency medicine, where staff sort incoming patients by urgency before treating them. Applied to feedback, triage means sorting incoming messages by what they need from you. Each message gets a decision, and the decision is recorded so nobody has to re-read the message to know its status.

Triage is not the same as fixing. A triage pass can end with a bug fixed, a feature planned, a message closed with a reason or a question sent back to the customer. The point is that every item leaves the unread pile with a clear next step.

Which decision does each item need?

Every item needs exactly one of four decisions:

• Act. The item is a bug you can reproduce, or a request that clearly fits the product. It moves to planned or to in progress.
• Plan. The item is valid but not for now. You record it so it can be found later, and you tell the customer if you want them to know it is recorded.
• Close. The item is a duplicate, spam, out of scope or already fixed. A short internal note explains why, so the next person does not reopen the same debate.
• Ask. The item cannot be acted on yet. A bug report with no steps, or a vague idea, needs one more question before a decision is possible.

The fourth decision is the one teams skip most often. Asking takes a minute and often turns a vague message into a bug you can fix.

Which statuses does triage use?

Triage needs a short, shared vocabulary for where an item stands. Escuta Produto uses five statuses: new, planned, in progress, done and closed. Each status answers a single question:

• New means nobody has decided yet.
• Planned means you decided to act, but the work has not started.
• In progress means someone is working on it.
• Done means the change shipped, and it is time to tell the customers who asked.
• Closed means you read it and chose not to act.

Keep the list short. Each extra status adds a decision that someone must make on every item, and the team stops agreeing on what each one means.

How often should triage run?

Triage works best as a fixed batch rather than a constant trickle. A weekly session is a good starting point for most small teams, with real-time alerts used only to tell people that something arrived.

A batch has two benefits. You can see repeats, such as three customers describing the same confusing step, which is hard to notice one message at a time. You also make decisions with the same standard for every item, because you judge them in one sitting.

If volume grows, shorten the cadence before you add people. A daily ten-minute pass keeps the new pile small. A weekly hour of reading two hundred items is where triage quietly stops.

What goes wrong when triage is skipped?

Without triage, messages pile up in an unread state and the inbox becomes a list of things nobody remembers. Three problems follow:

1. Customers stop writing. When they see no response for weeks, they assume nobody reads the messages.
2. Old bugs resurface as new reports. Each customer who hits a known bug writes again, and the same item gets reported many times.
3. Decisions get made by whoever shouts loudest. Without a routine, the most recent or most persistent message wins.

Triage fixes all three by giving every item a status and a reason, so the record shows what happened and why.

How do you run a triage session in Escuta Produto?

Open the product's inbox and filter by the new status. Read each bug with the page URL and browser saved on the item, because that information is often enough to start reproducing it. For each item, set the status and add an internal note with the reason. The note matters more than the status, because it stops the same decision being made twice.

Use the 30-day chart and the average rating on the same screen to notice spikes. A jump in bug messages after a release is a signal that a single status change will not show. For the full routine, including how to order the work, see how to triage customer feedback. For the rules that decide what happens to each item, read how to design a feedback status workflow.

Escuta Produto has no tags, so keep categories in the status and type, and use internal notes for anything more specific. If you need deeper analysis, export the product's feedback as UTF-8 CSV and count themes in a spreadsheet. The widget documentation covers the entry points that send messages into the inbox in the first place.