This article documents the legacy conversation priority experience for workspace admins and managers. Use it to understand how the on/off priority toggle worked, manage existing priority rules in Workflows, or update Workflows still using the old Mark as priority and Remove priority actions. For the current five-level priority scale (None, Low, Medium, High, Urgent), see Conversation priority levels.
Prioritizing conversations helps you:
See, and reply to, urgent conversations faster.
Better organize important conversations.
Work as a team, as all teammates see the same prioritized conversations.
There are two ways to prioritize conversations - manually and automatically.
Important: The priority star has been replaced by Conversation priority levels — a five-level scale (None, Low, Medium, High, Urgent) — for all workspaces. See that article for the current experience. The instructions below describe the legacy priority experience.
Manually prioritize conversations
To manually prioritize a conversation, press P or click the priority icon while in the conversation.
Sort your conversations list by Priority first to see prioritized conversations at the top:
The secondary sorting is newest, with priority conversations at the top and new conversations following.
All teammates will see the same list of prioritized conversations, so you can work on them as a team. 👌
Automatically prioritize conversations
With Workflows, you can prioritize conversations based on user attributes, message content, company data & more.
To set up a Workflow to prioritize your conversations, go to AI & Automation > Workflows and click + New workflow.
Workflows can also automatically tag conversations, set a priority level on them, or set conversation attributes & SLA rules. Learn more about building Workflows for all your automations.
Add an action to Apply rules to the Workflow path.
Click the Apply rules widget within the Workflows builder and choose which conditions must be met for a conversation to be marked as priority.
To make your rules more targeted, you should combine multiple pieces of data. For example, you could prioritize conversations with high-value customers who are in danger of cancelling their plan, by choosing the following attributes:
‘Cancel’ is in the message content.
Their monthly spend is above a certain amount.
They’re a user.
Click Save and close and set your Workflow live. All conversations that match the rule will have a priority level set automatically.
Create priority rules for every important conversation
You can set up as many priority rules as your team needs to provide a first class customer experience. For example, you could prioritize:
Conversations from social media, like Facebook.
Conversations with high-value customers or partners.
If your product has an urgent issue, you could prioritize all conversations that mention that issue.
If a conversation has been waiting without a reply for a certain amount of time, mark it as priority to guarantee a good experience for your customers.
Automatically prioritize qualified leads
If you qualify inbound leads using the Qualify leads bot, you can automatically prioritize conversations as a follow up rule. For example, you could prioritize conversations with leads in companies with over 100 employees.
In the follow-up action configuration for your Qualify leads bot, select Set priority and choose the level to apply to the conversation.
Conversations from newly qualified leads that match your follow-up rule will have a priority level set automatically.
Automatically remove priority
Priorities can shift as conversations are resolved or reassigned to different teams. To keep your inbox organized and focused on what's currently urgent, you can use Workflows to automatically remove a conversation's priority status.
For example, you could automatically remove priority when:
A conversation is closed.
A conversation is reassigned from a specialized team (e.g., "VIP Support") to a general queue.
A specific tag, like "
Case-Resolved", is added.
To set up a Workflow to remove priority:
Navigate to AI & Automation > Workflows and click + New workflow, or edit an existing one.
Choose the trigger for your Workflow. For example, the trigger could be If teammate closes a conversation.
On the Workflow path, click the + icon to add an action and select Set priority, then choose None to remove the conversation's priority.
Optionally, you can combine this with other actions, such as adding tags or updating conversation properties.
Click Save and close and set your Workflow live.
Now, whenever the trigger conditions are met, the priority status will be automatically removed from the conversation, ensuring your teammates are always focused on the most relevant tasks.
Note: The Remove Priority action has been replaced by Set priority → None. If you have existing Workflows still using Remove Priority, update them to use Set priority and select None.
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