How we route support escalations
The escalation-manager agent we run on Kortix — every 15 minutes it scans the Plain queue for SLA breaches, VIP accounts, and high-severity tickets, routes each to the right team, opens a linked Linear issue when engineering is needed, and posts to our escalation Slack channel. It never closes a ticket or promises a resolution.
A ticket that needs to jump the line looks like any other ticket until someone reads it closely: the SLA clock that's about to run out, the account that happens to be one of our biggest, the report that's actually a full outage. In a busy queue, those tickets sit in first-in-first-out order next to everything else, and the person who should be routing them is also the person answering the queue.
We run an escalation-manager agent on Kortix that checks the Plain queue every 15 minutes, finds the tickets that meet our escalation criteria, routes each one to the right internal team, opens a linked Linear issue when it's an engineering problem, and posts the whole thing to our escalation Slack channel. It routes, links, and alerts. It never closes a ticket and never tells a customer when or how their issue will be fixed.
The problem
Escalation-worthy tickets don't announce themselves. An SLA breach is a timestamp comparison someone has to actually run. A VIP account is a fact that lives in a spreadsheet or a CRM field, not in the ticket itself. High severity is a judgment call that depends on reading the ticket body, not just its tags. Any one of those, on its own, is easy to miss in a queue moving fast enough that most tickets get handled in the order they arrived.
The common fallback is a person periodically scanning the queue for anything that looks urgent, on top of their regular ticket load. It works until the queue is busy, at which point the SLA-breaching ticket and the VIP account's ticket wait behind ten routine ones, and the bug report that should already be a Linear issue is still just a paragraph in a support thread nobody on engineering has seen.
What we built
On Kortix, a cron fires every 15 minutes and spawns a fresh agent session. It reads the current state of the Plain queue, checks every open ticket against three criteria — SLA breach, VIP account, high severity — routes each qualifying ticket to the right internal team, opens a linked Linear issue when the ticket is an engineering problem, and posts one alert per escalation to the escalation Slack channel with the reason, the routed team, and the linked issue. It never closes a ticket, and it never tells the customer anything.
How it works
Run every 15 minutes, from scratch
A cron trigger fires every 15 minutes. Each firing spawns a fresh session with no memory of the last one — the agent re-checks the entire open queue against Plain's current state rather than trusting what it concluded 15 minutes ago. Nothing carries over, and nothing is missed because a prior run's notes went stale.
Give the agent the escalation rules
What counts as an escalation lives as a skill: the SLA targets per severity tier, the VIP account list, what qualifies as high severity, and the routing table mapping ticket type to owning team. When we tighten an SLA target or add an account to the VIP list, we update the skill and the next sweep applies it.
Connect the queue, the tracker, and the channel
Through scoped connectors and secrets, brokered server-side so no raw credential reaches the model, the agent:
- Reads and routes tickets in Plain — pulls the open queue, checks SLA timers and account metadata, and tags or assigns a qualifying ticket to the right internal team. It never resolves or closes a ticket.
- Opens a linked issue in Linear — when a ticket needs engineering work, it files an issue in the engineering team's tracker with the ticket's context attached, and links the two records to each other.
- Posts to Slack — one alert per escalation in the escalation channel: which ticket, why it escalated, which team it went to, and the linked issue if one was opened.
Set the guardrails
The agent's write access to Plain is scoped to routing, not resolving — it can tag and assign a ticket, but it cannot close one or mark it resolved. It never drafts or sends anything to the customer, and it never states or implies a resolution timeline. The only things that leave the sandbox are the Plain routing update, the linked Linear issue, and the Slack alert.
Route, link, and alert
With that in place, every 15 minutes the queue gets rechecked against the current SLA clock, the current VIP list, and the current severity of every open ticket. Whatever qualifies gets routed to the right team, gets a linked Linear issue if engineering needs to see it, and shows up in the escalation channel with the reason attached. The team decides what happens from there.
The pattern
A 15-minute cron spawns a fresh session that reads the Plain queue against skill-defined SLA targets, a VIP list, and a severity bar. It routes the ticket, opens a linked Linear issue for engineering work, and posts to Slack — it never closes a ticket or promises the customer anything.
Guardrails
The agent has write access to the support queue and the issue tracker, so its authority is scoped tightly to routing and alerting:
- Isolation. Every run happens in its own microVM sandbox. The session can reach only Plain, Linear, and the escalation Slack channel — nothing else.
- Scoped secrets. The Plain API key is encrypted in the Secrets Manager and injected into the sandbox at runtime; the Linear connector is brokered server-side. No raw credential is ever shown to the model or written to logs.
- Route and alert, never resolve. The agent can tag, assign, and open a linked issue. It cannot close a ticket, mark one resolved, or take any action that ends the customer's case.
- No promises to the customer. The agent never drafts or sends a customer-facing message and never states a resolution timeline. Every output is internal: the routing tag, the linked issue, and the Slack alert.
- Everything is code. The SLA targets, the VIP list, the severity bar, and the routing table are files in the repo, versioned and changed through a reviewed change request rather than a dashboard setting.
The outcome
Tickets that used to wait behind the rest of the queue for someone to notice now get caught within 15 minutes of qualifying, routed to the team that owns them, and — when it's an engineering problem — turned into a linked issue before anyone has to ask. The agent routes, links, and alerts; the team decides how the ticket actually gets resolved.
Read more
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