How to prioritize your most important customers
Bird
11 Oct 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.
