Find urgent customer emails in a spreadsheet
Urgency is a judgment, and the word "urgent" is a poor proxy for it. Put your definition in the question and let every message get a probability.
The formula
=HUNCH(A2:A500, "Does the customer need a response within hours, not days?")In Excel: =HUNCH.ASK(A2:A500, "Does the customer need a response within hours, not days?")
"Within hours, not days" is the definition. Change it to match your service level: "before the end of the business day", "is blocked from working", "mentions a deadline today".
Real outputs
| Row | A | B |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Message | Urgent? (0–1) |
| 2 | Our whole team is locked out since this morning, we have a client demo at 2pm. Please call me. | 0.97 |
| 3 | This is the third time I am writing about the same bug and nobody replies. I am done. | 0.52 |
| 4 | How do I add a second admin to my workspace? | 0.40 |
| 5 | Loving the new dashboard, small thing: the date picker ignores my timezone. | 0.39 |
| 6 | I was charged twice for the March invoice. Can you refund the duplicate? | 0.35 |
| 7 | Great support last week, thanks. Everything works now. | 0.12 |
| 8 | The export button does nothing on Safari. Works in Chrome. Not urgent. | 0.10 |
The customer who says "not urgent" gets 0.10. The one who says "I am done" gets 0.52: not blocked, but about to leave, which is why a second column for churn risk earns its place next to this one.
Make it visible
Conditional formatting on column B: color scale from white at 0 to red at 1. Then a daily view on another sheet:
=SORT(FILTER(A2:B500, B2:B500 >= 0.6), 2, FALSE)Pair urgency with the category formula from the ticket triage guide. "Urgent and billing" and "urgent and bug" go to different people.
Questions
Can it read a Gmail inbox directly?
What threshold should I use?
Run it on your own column
Copy the template (or use the Excel add-in), paste your key, point the formula at your data. Every formula here has its Excel spelling underneath. 100 rows free to start, then $29 for 5,000 rows. Credits never expire and there is no subscription.
Reference: HUNCH