How to prioritize your most important customers
Bird
Oct 11, 2022
Customer Success
1 min read
Key Takeaways
The Pareto principle applies strongly in customer support — a small subset of customers typically generates the majority of revenue.
Many companies still offer the same support experience to all customers, regardless of value, loyalty, or lifetime spend.
Prioritizing high-value customers improves satisfaction, reduces churn, and aligns support resources with business impact.
Historically, prioritization required expensive telecom tools and engineering-heavy workflows, making it inaccessible.
Flow Builder enables teams to automate prioritization logic using external data, conditions, and queue assignments — without writing complex code.
A simple prioritization workflow: catch incoming call → fetch customer priority via API → branch by loyalty tier → transfer to the right queue.
Priority queues can be tuned with better agent ratios, faster response times, or specialized reps for VIP tiers.
The setup can combine multiple data sources, metrics, CRM values, loyalty programs, or custom business rules.
This approach works for both voice and messaging channels, simply by switching the trigger type.
Q&A Highlights
Why should businesses prioritize their most valuable customers?
Because high-value customers drive a disproportionate share of revenue. Prioritizing them reduces churn, increases loyalty, and improves overall customer lifetime value.
What is the main problem with treating all customers the same?
It spreads support resources thin. VIP customers wait in the same queue as low-value customers, leading to slower resolutions and lower satisfaction.
How does the Pareto principle apply to customer support?
Roughly 20% of customers generate 80% of a company’s revenue, meaning those customers should receive faster service and higher-quality support.
Why don’t most companies prioritize incoming support requests today?
Because building complex routing logic historically required expensive telecom infrastructure and significant engineering involvement.
How does Flow Builder solve this problem?
It empowers cross-functional teams to build prioritization flows that fetch data, run conditions, and route customers — all visually and without deep engineering work.
What kinds of data can be used to prioritize customers?
Loyalty tier, order volume, lifetime value, subscription plan, account manager assignment, number of purchases, or any custom field available through your internal API.
How does the workflow begin?
With a call trigger: once a number is purchased and selected, the flow can intercept incoming calls and start the routing logic.
How is customer priority retrieved?
Using a fetch-variables step that calls your internal API to return fields such as loyalty status, account tier, or customer category.
How does the system route customers based on priority?
By using a branch step that checks conditions (e.g., “loyalty_status equals gold or platinum”) and sends callers into different paths.
How are different queues assigned?
Each branch forwards the call to a specific SIP-based call queue, allowing high-value customers to reach specialized or faster support teams.
Can this workflow be applied to messaging channels?
Yes — simply switch the call trigger to a messaging trigger like WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram, or Messenger.
How complex can these prioritization flows become?
As complex as needed. Teams can combine multiple data sources, CRM lookups, external APIs, business rules, wait-time calculations, and more to fully customize prioritization logic.
This post is part of a series on optimizing customer support operations. In it, we cover how to prioritize your most important customers. Discover more ways to improve customer service efficiency by reading the full guide here.
Not all customers are created equal
Following the Pareto principle, we can state that around 80% of your revenue can be attributed to about 20% of your customer base. So, it only makes sense to treat your most valuable and loyal customers with extra care - right? It’s already a common practice in many industries, just think about the lines you get to skip at the airport after raising through the levels of the frequent flyer program or the extra discounts you get when returning to your favourite sporting goods brand.
However, over and over we see companies offering their customers the same support across the board. Wouldn’t it make more sense to get your most valuable customers to skip the line and talk to your best performing reps as soon as possible?
Why isn’t everyone prioritizing their incoming inquiries?
This is how you do it
In this how-to, we will be looking at how you would pull in data from an external system which you can use to prioritize different customers in less than 5 minutes. We will go through a simple example, but you can pull in as many data sources and logic steps as you like.
What we are trying to achieve:
Take an incoming call, pull data from our internal systems
Route customers based on importance
Assign each customer to the right queue
Catch the incoming call
The simplest way is to catch an incoming call is to use a call trigger. Make sure you have bought a number - as soon as you do it will show up in the number selector on the right. As soon as you pick a number and you hit publish you are ready to start receiving calls. If you are trying to do something similar for a messaging based channel, just switch out the trigger to one of the messaging triggers.
Fetch priority from your internal system
When the call comes in, we want to know who the customer is and what their loyalty status is (assuming that this is available from your API). Of course you can pick whatever data point is available from your API, for example you might want to route based on the number of orders or connect someone directly to their account manager. All of these things just require you to tweak the fetch variables step to make sure you get the right data. If you don’t know what an API is, you might want to ask some help from a developer to configure this step.
Naming the variable makes is available to all following steps in the flow, we can now reference it and pass it as an input.
Route the flow based on customer priority
We now know the loyalty status of our customer and want to split the incoming calls based on the priority we want to give them. We add a branch step which allows us to check for a condition. As you can see we branch off if the loyalty status is gold or platinum. The rest of the incoming calls go into the last path.
Transfer each conversation to a queue
Lastly we are handing over to a call queue. We have three call queues setup which will be managed with rules specific to the type of customers. For example you might assign a higher average rep to caller ratio for your priority queues.
We are using the Forward Call step’s SIP trunking functionality to connect the call through to our preconfigured call queues. You can do this by submitting a SIP URI in the number field.
Feel free to reach out!
Keep in mind, this is just one example of how this could work in the real world. We have seen people combine all sorts of data sources, third party services, and channels. The sky's the limit!
If you have a problem that could be optimized with communication automation we would love to talk to you. Feel free to reach out here and we can set up some time with a product expert to help make your ideas a reality.
