# 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.

Updated 22 September 2026. Source: https://hunchsheet.app/formulas/find-urgent-customer-emails-spreadsheet

## 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

| Message | Urgent? (0–1) |
| --- | --- |
| Our whole team is locked out since this morning, we have a client demo at 2pm. Please call me. | 0.97 |
| This is the third time I am writing about the same bug and nobody replies. I am done. | 0.52 |
| How do I add a second admin to my workspace? | 0.40 |
| Loving the new dashboard, small thing: the date picker ignores my timezone. | 0.39 |
| I was charged twice for the March invoice. Can you refund the duplicate? | 0.35 |
| Great support last week, thanks. Everything works now. | 0.12 |
| 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)
```

> Tip: 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?

Not by itself. Export or sync messages to a sheet (Gmail add-ons and Apps Script both do it), then point the formula at the text column.

### What threshold should I use?

Start at 0.6, read what falls just above and below for a week, then move it. The right threshold depends on your definition and your volume.