Support Inbox Triage: every customer email classified, prioritized, and routed in seconds
An n8n workflow that reads every incoming support email, has Claude classify it (bug, refund, question, urgent), apply the matching Gmail label, and escalate genuinely urgent ones straight to Slack with a summary — so the angry-customer email never sits unread for six hours.
- 1
Watch the support inbox
A
Gmail Triggerpolls the support address every minute. ACodenode strips signatures and quoted history so Claude reads only the new message — cleaner input, cheaper calls, better classification. - 2
Classify with Claude
One
HTTP Requestto Claude: return JSON {category: bug|billing|refund|question|feedback|spam, urgency: 0-10, customer_mood: calm|frustrated|angry, one_line_summary}. The one-line summary gets reused everywhere downstream — this is the recipe's workhorse call. - 3
Label and route
A
Gmailnode applies the label matching the category (create the labels once). ASwitchnode routes: spam archives silently, refunds+billing can also append to a finance sheet, everything else just sits correctly labeled for the team. - 4
Escalate the urgent
An
IFon urgency ≥ 8 (or mood = angry) posts to Slack:🚨 URGENT — order paid, not delivered, customer threatening chargeback — from jane@… — [open]. The link jumps straight to the thread. Six-hour silences on fires become six-minute responses.
Frequently asked questions
What does 'urgent' actually mean to the classifier?
You define it in the prompt; the template ships with: payment taken but product not delivered, security concerns, legal threats, public-complaint threats, and total inability to use the product. Claude also scores frustration from the language. Tune the list to your business — 'wedding is Saturday' is critical for a florist, noise for a SaaS.
Does it reply to customers automatically?
No — deliberately. This recipe is triage: classify, label, route, escalate. Auto-replies without human review are where support automation gets companies into trouble. Pair it with the FAQ Auto-Responder recipe if you want drafted replies waiting alongside — a human still hits send.
We use a shared support@ inbox with three people. Does this fit?
Perfectly — that's the target setup. Labels become your queue (bug / billing / question), the Slack escalation goes to your team channel, and the daily-summary branch tells everyone what came in and what's still unlabeled. For a full helpdesk (assignment, SLAs), you'd graduate to a real tool; until ~50 emails/day, this is enough.