A professional-services firm ran most of its client and supplier traffic through a single shared inbox, and the first job each morning was untangling it. Someone senior would read through a few hundred messages, decide which were urgent, which belonged to which team, and which were just noise, then drag them into folders or forward them on. It was an hour or more of skilled time spent sorting post, and on a heavy day the genuinely urgent enquiry could sit unread behind the clutter until it was a problem.
What mattered most
- A misrouted urgent message is worse than an unsorted one, so getting priority right mattered more than sorting everything.
- The same message could read as routine or serious depending on tone and intent, not just keywords.
- The team had to keep oversight; nothing should be auto-archived or answered without a person seeing it.
- It had to work inside their existing mailbox, not a new ticketing system they would resent.
How we approached it
We started from how the desk already triaged, in their heads, and turned that into categories the tool could apply — by topic, by team, by likely urgency. The system reads each incoming message, classifies it, and routes it to the right place with a suggested priority. Crucially, it does not answer anything and it does not delete anything; it sorts and surfaces. Where it is unsure — an ambiguous message, an unfamiliar sender, something that reads as urgent but does not fit a category — it does not guess. It leaves the message prominent and unlabelled for a person to read.
The triage runs inside the mailbox the team already lived in, so nothing changed about how they reply. We let the team correct a wrong routing with a single move, and fed those corrections back so the categories sharpened over the first few weeks. We measured against how quickly an urgent enquiry reached the right person and against the share of mail that needed manual re-sorting — not against raw classification accuracy, since getting the urgent few right matters more than the routine many.
Where it stands
The desk now opens to an inbox that is already mostly sorted, with the urgent items at the top and the unclear handful waiting for a human read. The morning hour of sorting has largely gone, and the worry that an important enquiry is lost behind the clutter has gone with it. The team still reads everything that needs a person; they just no longer start the day as a sorting office.