How do you allow Customers to escalate the Priority (or request for that)?

[Berto2002]

Hi everyone,

I have a need for a selected group of Users/Customers (Basic Users) to be able to elevate the priority of their existing Request (or at least ask for it to be increased). These are a small team, acting on behalf of our Councillors and the mission is to enable them to raise the Priority of Cllrs' tickets rather than have the Cllrs calling our Director for all their little IT issues. So we can train these people to do something intricate or precise if necessary.

Has anyone worked-out a nice little way for that to happen?

I was thinking of some ideas such as:

1. If I was building a system, I'd allow a Custom Button on the Customer Portal that would only show for members of certain Subscriber Lists
2. Or is there a way for Users to trigger an autotask by, say, adding an Update in their ticket with a certain string?
3. Or could a routing rule pick-up an email with a certain subject and update the priority of an existing ticket in their name?

Or even if they cannot actually affect the Priority, how could we get a specific update to Service Desk that was received as a request for the Priority to be increased or treated as an escalation?

Am I asking, "how can select Users be given the chance to systematically escalate their issues?"