Severity Triage: Auditing a Week of Flagged Complaints
Objective: Given a week's worth of real-style flagged customer complaints and social mentions, apply the lesson's 1-5 severity framework to decide which get a holding statement and which don't.
You're the trust and safety comms analyst at Instacart. Six items were flagged by the monitoring dashboard this week, and you have one hour before the weekly comms sync to triage them.
Score every item on the 1-5 scale from the lesson, decide the right owner for each, then draft one holding statement for the item that actually clears the Level 4 bar.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, no account friction, matches the intake sheet a real trust and safety team uses
Free and keeps the statement in a shareable, commentable format for a comms lead to review
The process
2 steps
Step 01 of 02
The lesson's Stage 2 splits incidents into Level 1-2 (isolated complaint, handled by support), Level 3 (multiple complaints or a sensitive topic, comms lead notified), and Level 4-5 (national coverage, safety risk, or regulatory attention, CEO and legal convene within the hour).
Six flagged items this week: (1) one customer tweet about a late delivery, (2) 40+ complaints about a specific shopper mishandling an allergy note, with a local news tip-line inquiry, (3) a viral TikTok alleging a driver followed a customer home, 600K views, (4) a one-star app review, (5) a data-broker report that a food safety inspector is asking questions about a warehouse, (6) three complaints about a coupon code not applying. Score each 1-5.
Procedure
- List all six items as rows with a short description
- Score each 1-5 using the lesson's three tiers, not gut feeling
- Assign an owner per score: support for 1-2, comms lead for 3, CEO plus legal plus comms lead for 4-5
- Write a one-sentence reasoning for the two highest scores, since those are the ones a director will ask about
SEVERITY TRIAGE, week of Aug 11 1. Late delivery tweet — Level 1 — Owner: support 2. Allergy mishandling, 40+ complaints + local news inquiry — Level 4 — Owner: CEO/legal/comms Reasoning: Safety-adjacent topic plus outside media interest clears the Level 4 bar even without national reach. 3. Viral TikTok, driver followed customer home, 600K views — Level 5 — Owner: CEO/legal/comms Reasoning: Personal safety allegation plus viral reach is the clearest Level 5 case in the batch. 4. One-star app review — Level 1 — Owner: support 5. Warehouse inspector inquiry via data broker — Level 3 — Owner: comms lead notified, watch for escalation 6. Coupon code complaints — Level 1 — Owner: support
Healthy
The two flagged items with safety implications and outside interest (items 2 and 3) get escalated same-day; routine items stay with support.
Unhealthy
Treating item 3 (600K-view safety allegation) the same as item 6 (coupon complaints) because both are 'just social media noise.'
What this means
Severity scoring is about scale and audience risk, not how annoyed the complaint sounds. A quiet inquiry from a food safety inspector outranks a loud complaint about a coupon.
So what do I do about it?
| Symptom | Action | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Every flagged item lands in the same Slack channel with no triage | Build a severity-scored intake sheet so Level 4-5 items get routed within the hour, not discovered at the next sync | 30 min |
Step 02 of 02
A holding statement acknowledges the situation directly, states what action is already underway, and commits to a specific update time. All three parts are required; a statement missing the specific time is incomplete.
Item 3, the viral TikTok safety allegation, is your Level 5. Draft the holding statement using the three-part structure.
Procedure
- Write the acknowledgment sentence naming the situation without confirming unverified details
- Write the action-underway sentence describing what's happening right now, not what you plan to eventually do
- Write a specific update-time commitment, a real clock time or a stated number of hours, never 'soon'
We are aware of a video circulating regarding a delivery interaction and take any concern about customer or shopper safety seriously. We are actively reviewing the specific order and shopper account involved and have suspended the shopper pending that review. We will share a full update by 6 PM ET today.
Healthy
The statement names the concern, describes a concrete action already taken (suspension pending review), and gives a real clock time.
Unhealthy
'We take all reports seriously and will look into this matter.' No action stated, no time given, reads as a placeholder.
What this means
The specific time commitment is the part most drafts skip, and it's the part that does the most work: it gives the public a reason to wait instead of fill the silence with speculation.
So what do I do about it?
| Symptom | Action | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Draft statements consistently omit a specific update time | Add 'update time' as a required field in the statement template so it can't ship without one | 5 min |
Final deliverable
A six-item severity triage sheet with scores, owners, and reasoning, plus one complete holding statement for the highest-severity item.
See a reference example
Coinbase severity triage (excerpt) 1. Login outage complaints (12) — Level 2 — Owner: support 2. Regulator inquiry re: cold storage practices — Level 4 — Owner: CEO/legal/comms Draft statement: 'We are aware of an inquiry regarding our cold storage practices and are cooperating fully with the review. Our security team has confirmed all customer assets remain fully backed 1:1. We will provide a full update by end of day Friday.'
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- All six items scored using the lesson's tiers, not intuition
- Correct owner assigned per severity level
- Holding statement includes all three required parts: acknowledgment, action, specific time