Customer prioritization strategies for small businesses

If you’re a small business owner, it may be tempting to handle every customer request, call, and message in one day. But most businesses don’t have the resources to do this forever. Unless you have a time machine, you’re going to need a customer prioritization strategy.

Customer prioritization doesn’t mean playing favorites. It’s about making sure your attention and resources go where they’ll have the biggest impact. This makes it easier to respond to customer complaints and keep delivering five-star customer service. 

In this guide, we’ll show you how to prioritize customer interactions strategically. Plus, we’ll share a downloadable prioritization matrix that can help you organize customer requests faster.

Customer prioritization: The S.C.A.L.E method 

Not sure where to start with customer prioritization? You can use the S.C.A.L.E. method to rank customer communications from high to low priority, which makes it easier to achieve first call resolution, improve customer orientation, and keep people satisfied with your customer service.

Here’s how to get started by:

1. Segmenting customers
2. Committing resources
3. Arranging requests
4. Listing priorities
5. Executing tasks

1. Segment customers to identify the most valuable groups 

Categorizing your customer base based on common characteristics helps you focus your limited resources more effectively. 

There are a few different ways to segment customers:

• Revenue (high-value vs. low-value)
• Frequency (regular vs. occasional)
• Loyalty (highly active vs. rarely active)
• Relationship length (long-term vs. new)
• Potential for growth (higher likelihood of scaling vs. lower likelihood of scaling)

Not sure how to identify these segments? You can use CRM metrics or customer data from calls to identify patterns, like people who consistently spend more, require more support, or generate higher lifetime value.

If you’re an OpenPhone customer, you can tag customers as VIPs (or other important segments) in custom properties or add a Date field to show how long they’ve been a customer. That way, team members have more context and can decide how to prioritize customer requests.

2. Commit resources where they matter most

The next step in the prioritization process is deciding how much time, support, and effort to devote to each customer segment. Going the extra mile for segments that contribute the most to your growth will make customers feel valued, which deepens relationships and ensures they don’t switch to competitors.

Create a system for this by setting clear guidelines (in writing) for response times, support levels, offers, and follow-up routines.

Some options:

• Assign experienced reps to your high-value segments. For example, you might set up inbound call routing so high-value customer requests go to senior support team members.
  
• Set response time targets within each of your segments. For top-tier customers, this might be something like replying within an hour. For lower-value segments, this might be within 24 hours.
  
• Use an AI assistant to provide 24/7 support to low-value customers. OpenPhone’s Sona can provide support around the clock based on the existing information you feed it. If customers still can’t get their questions answered, they can request a callback from a human rep. 

Of course, not all types of calls need human intervention.

If you’re an OpenPhone user, you can tap into Sona to automate answering common questions (like FAQs and business hours) and keep non-urgent calls from bogging down your team. 

When a call does need human attention, Sona gathers key details — like the caller’s name, their reason for calling, urgency, and best callback time — so your people can prioritize who to call back first.

💡 Pro tip: Robocalls blowing up your phone? You can reduce them by setting up an IVR call flow (think “Press 1 for support”). This keeps your customer support team from getting distracted and leaves them open to address genuine requests.

3. Arrange customer requests by type

Not every request requires the same workflow. A high-priority billing dispute will need a different approach than a high-priority technical issue, for example.

That’s why you need to separate your customer requests into different topics and categories. Not only will it be easier to send requests to the right person, but it’ll also be easier to remember and apply the right prioritization rules.

Try tagging or sorting requests into clear categories like:

• Pricing issue
• Troubleshooting
• Service request
• Feature request (like user experience improvements)

• Sales inquiry and quote request
• Appointment booking
• Billing and account issue
• Customer feedback
• General inquiry

From here, you can send requests to the right person and apply the right customer prioritization rules.

Want to sort topics automatically so your team doesn’t have to? You can use OpenPhone’s AI call tags, available on the Scale plan. AI call tagging labels calls based on customer needs, sentiment, or call drivers. Then, you can filter calls by category to focus on more pressing types of customer requests.

4. List priorities using urgency and impact

Your immediate attention isn’t always required. Even high-value customers will have low-priority requests once in a while. Plus, not every “urgent” issue has a major business impact.

To prioritize which messages need your attention first, consider using a priority matrix. This straightforward grid helps you sort requests by two criteria: urgency (how quickly you must respond) and impact (how much it will affect your business).

For example, someone getting locked out of their building at night would be categorized as an urgent request. Needing more staff members to cut down on long wait times isn’t an immediate crisis, but it does have a long-term impact.

With a priority matrix, you can categorize requests into four buckets:

• High urgency, high impact. Requests you should handle immediately, like a burst pipe or a VIP threatening to cancel their services. If you have a senior customer success team, you might route these requests to them.
  
• High urgency, low impact. Requests you should address quickly, but second. Maybe you have a customer demanding a refund on a small purchase or a surge of same-day appointment reschedules. Set a clear response time goal to avoid pulling resources from high-impact tasks.
  
• Low urgency, high impact. Requests you should delegate or schedule a response for so they don’t become more urgent later. For example, you might be struggling with frequent no-shows or a warm sales lead you haven’t yet followed up on.
  
• Low urgency, low impact. Requests you should handle when resources allow. Examples could be a customer requesting a feature that doesn’t align with your product team’s roadmap or when you need to make a minor branding update. Either way, they can wait until you have time.

📥 Download our prioritization matrix template to organize customer priorities faster.

5. Execute priorities in order of arrival

Once you’ve categorized requests using the customer prioritization matrix, you should address them systematically to avoid bottlenecks and missed issues.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to take action in your request’s order of arrival. This is often called a “first-in-first-out” strategy (or FIFO), which means you handle requests in the order they come in. 

This prevents newer requests from jumping ahead unfairly and helps maintain customer expectations (like sticking to your one-hour response window for VIPs).

If you’re worried about messages falling through the cracks, you can use OpenPhone’s call views to filter calls and sort callbacks in order of priority. For example, you might filter calls for managers from oldest to newest so they address calls in the order they’re received.

Once your team has responded to a message, they can mark it as “Done” to keep their inbox clear. If they need to loop someone in to answer a question or escalate a message, they can use internal threads to tag a teammate and delegate tasks without leaving the app. 

Make customer prioritization easier with OpenPhone

If you’re used to juggling all customer requests at once, implementing a customer prioritization strategy might feel awkward or even scary. What if you risk ignoring your customers or being unfair? But customer prioritization isn’t about that. It’s about managing your resources (time, money, and mental energy) well so the right people get the right attention at the right time.

No need to juggle all this by yourself, though. With OpenPhone, you can easily mark customer segments with custom properties, automatically sort calls based on sentiments and topics with call tags, and organize priorities for your team in call views.

With OpenPhone, you can also:

• Share phone numbers to split responsibility for incoming calls, which will give your team more bandwidth to address high-priority messages
• Integrate with your CRM to track customer segments and request types, then push data from your phone system to your CRM to keep data up to date
• Automatically generate call recordings, transcripts, and action steps to quickly follow up and send context to your team
• Create customer service text templates (also called snippets) to speed up responses to FAQs and routine requests
• Acknowledge missed calls, texts, and voicemails in real time with auto-replies that set expectations about when you’ll respond

See why OpenPhone is trusted by 58,000+ businesses by signing up for a seven-day free trial.

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