Here's the Problem:
I'm in charge of a user support hotline for a new server-based application in a large company. The application is not that good and we get a lot of calls and emails from our users. So far we're using an issue tracking tool (Jira) so manage all inquiries from our users.
Our support team processes the tickets with the highest priority first. We constantly have about 50 open tickets. So it might take a few days days until we analyse and solve a low priority ticket. Therefore a good classification of the tickets is necessary.
We're constantly improving the application and documentation, but that takes some time.
Constraints
We have to decide the priority before a detailed technical analysis. The guy at the phone is not a deep technical expert. Each user claims that his/her problem is a life-threatening show stopper. Our users must be able to understand why a certain ticket has a certain priority. Therefore will publish the criteria in our documentation.
The questions to you:
How should we decide on the priority of the tickets? Does anyone know a set of well-proven criteria for this problem?