Customer Support Triage Flowchart
The code
flowchart TD
A[Ticket arrives] --> B{Paying customer?}
B -- Yes --> C[Priority queue]
B -- No --> D[Standard queue]
C --> E{Churn risk?}
E -- Yes --> F[Assign senior agent]
E -- No --> G[Assign tier one agent]
D --> G
F --> H[Respond within 1 hour]
G --> I[Respond within 24 hours]
H --> J{Issue resolved?}
I --> J
J -- No --> K[Escalate to engineering]
J -- Yes --> L((Ticket closed))
How this template works
This template captures how a support team sorts work the moment a ticket lands. Two questions do the heavy lifting — is this a paying customer, and are they at risk of leaving — and the answers decide which human responds and how fast. Support leads use it to document the routing rules that usually live only in someone’s head, and it doubles as onboarding material for new agents who need to know why the priority queue exists and when they are allowed to escalate.
The syntax demonstrates sorting by convergence. flowchart TD arranges the flow top-down, with the two queues C[Priority queue] and D[Standard queue] sitting side by side after the first diamond. Each labeled edge such as B -- Yes --> C is a routing rule you can read aloud: paying customers go to the priority queue. The second diamond refines the priority path, and then both agent assignment paths converge on G[Assign tier one agent] — node G receives an edge from E and from D, which is how you express that two different routes share a destination. The resolution check J{Issue resolved?} is fed by both response-time nodes, and its No branch J -- No --> K[Escalate to engineering] is the escape hatch that keeps tickets from dying quietly in a queue.
The gotcha is the convergence point. When several edges point at one node, people often delete that node while cleaning up and forget the other arrows still reference it — Mermaid then recreates an empty node and your queues appear to route into a blank box. Before deleting anything, search the code for the id to see every edge that depends on it. Also note that labels like H[Respond within 1 hour] are safe unquoted, but adding a parenthetical such as (SLA) requires quoting the whole label.
To adapt it, swap the two sorting questions for whatever your team actually asks first — plan tier, contract size, or severity all work. If you have three agent tiers, add a third assignment node and route to it explicitly.
Related templates: the decision tree flowchart generalizes this questioning pattern to any routing problem, the order fulfillment flowchart shows the upstream process that generates these tickets, and the approval workflow flowchart models a similar two-level review with a threshold. The flowchart diagram guide is the full syntax reference.
Variations to try
- Add a business-hours diamond before assignment so overnight tickets route to a follow-the-sun team.
- Replace the churn risk question with a plan tier check if your product has no churn model yet.
- Wrap the two response steps in a subgraph named First reply to highlight the promise you commit to.
