Problem
Support SLAs rarely fail with a loud alert. They fail silently. The risk is invisible until the breach is already recorded and the customer is already waiting.
In most teams, escalation is manual. Someone checks dashboards. Someone remembers a ticket. Someone posts in Slack. Engineering work is created late, without context, or not tracked consistently.
Illustration: event-driven SLA tracking, early escalation, and tracked work creation.
What the system does
This solution treats SLA as a system concern. It continuously evaluates ticket state, detects risk early, escalates with explicit ownership, and creates tracked work when needed.
- Start SLA timers on ticket create or update
- Detect at-risk and breach states automatically
- Escalate with clear owner and next action
- Create engineering tasks with links and context
- Produce a daily digest: at-risk, breached, backlog aging, exceptions
- Keep an audit trail of ownership and key actions
How it works
The core idea is event flow, not point-to-point integrations. A new or updated ticket produces an event. That event triggers routing, ownership, and SLA evaluation. When thresholds are reached, the system emits SLA warning events.
Today, the working implementation runs on an internal Issue Tracker System and an internal event bus. It does not call Zendesk, Intercom, Slack, Teams, Jira, or Linear. That is intentional: integrations are replaceable adapters.
Integrations
The workflow is designed to plug into real systems based on your stack:
- Support: Zendesk or Intercom
- Chat: Slack or Microsoft Teams
- Engineering tasks: Jira, Linear, or GitHub Issues
- Reporting: daily digest plus lightweight dashboard
Pilot scope and success metrics
The pilot focuses on one end-to-end flow: routing plus SLA timers, escalation, tracked work creation, and digest. The goal is predictable ownership and fewer breaches, not a big migration.
- First response time
- SLA breach count
- Backlog age distribution
- Time to escalation and time to resolution
Next
If your support team escalates to engineering weekly and SLA risk shows up too late, this is the exact workflow to automate first.
Solution page: Support SLA escalation