SLA-Aware Triage Scoring

Problem

No single field on a ticket captures its true priority. Time-to-breach matters, but a distant deadline on a top-tier account can still outrank a near deadline on a free-tier one, and a customer whose tone is deteriorating may need attention before either. Sorting by any one of these axes alone mis-orders the queue, and the breach risk is only visible once the deadline is already close, which is too late to act. The queue needs one comparable score that fuses the axes and looks ahead to predicted breaches.

Solution

Define a scoring function over each open ticket. Read its SLA clock to compute time remaining to breach, look up the requester's contractual entitlement or account tier, and estimate a sentiment trajectory from the conversation so far. Normalise each axis and combine them with explicit, reviewable weights into one fused triage score; sort the queue by that score so the next item an agent picks is the one with the most at stake. In parallel, run a breach predictor that compares each ticket's expected time-to-completion against its deadline and emits an early alert for those on track to breach, so they can be expedited or escalated before the window closes rather than after. Keep the weights and the per-ticket score contributions visible so a slipped commitment can be traced to the inputs that ranked it.

When to use

• Work arrives into a shared queue under contractual SLAs with different deadlines per account or entitlement tier.
• Demand exceeds capacity, so the pick order genuinely decides which commitments are met.
• Time-to-breach, account value, and customer sentiment each carry real signal and no single one suffices as the sort key.