A long time ago when I worked in ticket/email-based technical support, I had an idea for ticket prioritization. I never convinced any of my bosses to try it, but here it is in case anyone is in a position to give it a try:

The user is presented with three(ish) levels of priority. Low, Medium, High. They prioritize their tickets when they create them.

The support person is presented with five levels of priority. Back burner, Low, Medium, High, Critical. By default, the user's levels map to the middle three levels. Every ticket must be [re]prioritized by the support person *when it's closed*, with informed hindsight of what the actual importance and urgency were.

Now, here's the fun part. After a user has submitted a few tickets, the system can learn how well they prioritize their own tickets. If a user's "High" always earns a "Critical" from the support person, then eventually their High tickets will automatically get upgraded to Critical before a support person sees them (and might get seen sooner!). If a user marks everything "High", they will probably all get downgraded to "Medium" internally.

If you ever implement this, let me know, please. Also, if you ever want this implemented in your ticket system, I'd love to take a stab at it.