You hired someone. You stepped back. The tickets kept coming.

So you hired another person. Tickets still coming. Response times getting worse, not better. Everyone busy, nothing moving.

Welcome to the inbox that never clears.

Here's what's actually happening. You don't have a staffing problem. You have a routing problem. Every ticket lands in the same place, gets picked up by whoever's available, and handled differently every single time. No triage. No priority logic. No way to tell what's urgent from what just feels urgent.

So everything gets treated like a five-alarm fire. Which means nothing actually gets treated like one.

The other thing nobody tells you: without a triage system, your best people spend their day on the easiest tickets. Not because they're lazy — because easy tickets close fast and fast closures feel like progress. The gnarly ones, the ones that actually need attention, sit there aging quietly at the bottom of the queue.

Meanwhile, engineering starts getting pinged. Just quick questions, at first. "Hey, do you know what causes this error?" Then it's daily. Then it's a running joke that isn't really a joke. More people won't fix this. Structure will.

A basic triage system. Agreed response tiers. A clear line between what support handles and what gets escalated, and to whom. None of this needs to be complicated. It needs to exist.

Because an inbox without structure isn't a support function. It's a room where problems go to wait.

Next time: what happens when engineering gets pulled in — and why they start avoiding Slack.