Set up customer tiers

Customer tiers classify your contacts by importance — VIP, Gold, Silver, or whatever your business uses — and drive visual badges, priority routing, voice-queue position, and SLA differentiation. This article walks through the one-time setup.

Before you start

• You need an Owner or Admin role.
• Decide how many tiers you’ll use. The maximum is six per tenant. Most teams land on three or four.
• If you plan to tie tiers to SLA policies, create those first — it’s easier to wire them up after the tiers exist.

Steps

1. Open CRM Settings

Go to Settings → CRM Settings. You’ll see two tabs: Overview and Customer Tiers. Switch to Customer Tiers.

2. Turn the feature on

In the top-right of the Customer Tiers card, toggle Enable. Until this is on, tier badges don’t appear anywhere in the app and you can’t assign tiers to contacts.

3. Choose what to call the feature

By default the field on a contact is labeled “Customer Tier”. You can rename it to match your internal vocabulary — common choices are “Membership Tier”, “Plan”, “Account Type”, or “Segment”. Type the name into the Feature Name input and click outside the box to save. The new name appears everywhere a tier is shown.

4. Add your tiers

Click Add Tier. Fill in:

• Tier Name — e.g., VIP, Gold, Silver. Use what your business uses.
• Color — pick one of the six presets or use the color picker for a custom hex code. The color drives the badge anywhere a tier is shown.

Click Create Tier. The tier appears in the list. Repeat for each tier you need, up to six.

5. Order the tiers by priority

Drag the tiers in the list to set their order. Position one (top) is the highest priority — the tier that gets first treatment in routing and queueing. Position six is the lowest. Priority shows next to each tier name.

6. Pick a default tier (optional)

Use the Default Tier for New Contacts dropdown to choose which tier new contacts inherit on creation. Most teams pick the lowest tier as the default (“Standard” or “Bronze”) so every new contact starts somewhere and special cases are upgraded explicitly. Pick None if you’d rather leave new contacts untagged.

7. Decide on inbox sort order (optional)

Toggle Float tiered customers to the top of the inbox to push conversations from tagged contacts above untagged ones in the conversation list, ordered by tier priority within the tagged group. Your existing sort still applies inside each tier — this just changes the top-level grouping.

If most of your contacts are tagged, leaving this off is usually cleaner. If only a small slice carries a tier (true VIPs only, say), turning it on makes them visually unmistakable.

Verify it worked

Open the CRM. Pick any contact. The tier dropdown should now appear on the contact record — you can assign a tier and the badge color should match what you configured.

Go to the conversation list. If you’ve assigned a tier to at least one contact and that contact has conversations, you should see the colored badge on their conversation row.

Linking tiers to SLA policies

Tying a tier to an SLA policy — so VIPs get tighter response and resolution targets — is configured from the SLA side, not from the tier itself. See Tie an SLA policy to a customer tier.

Assigning tiers to contacts

You can assign tiers three ways:

1. Manually — open a contact, pick a tier from the dropdown.
2. By automation — use an automation rule with a “Set customer tier” action. Conditions like email domain, custom field value, or conversation count are common triggers.
3. By API — push tier assignments from an external system via the Atender API.

Most teams combine all three: manual for one-offs, automation for “everyone from @bigclient.com is Gold”, and API for syncing with the source-of-truth CRM.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: The badge color looks slightly different from what I picked. Fix: The color is rendered with the app’s badge styling, which applies a small opacity layer in some places. Pick a richer, more saturated color if the result feels too pale.
• Symptom: I can’t add a seventh tier. Fix: Six is the hard cap. Delete or rename an existing tier if you need to make room.
• Symptom: Deleting a tier — what happens to contacts assigned to it? Fix: They keep their assignment cleared (tier is removed). Conversations they have remain untouched. The action can’t be undone, so consider renaming the tier instead if you want to reuse its slot.