Project Overview

AI Ticket Routing & SLA Control is an automated routing system for customer requests at HouseBox, an online home goods store. Every incoming email is analysed instantly: AI determines the category, the priority and the responsible owner, hands the ticket to the right person and records it in a single database. Separately, the system watches deadlines and escalates overdue requests on its own.

Instead of manually digging through a shared inbox, every ticket immediately reaches its owner with the right priority — nothing gets lost and nobody is left waiting.

Context

HouseBox is an online store selling home goods. All customer requests — questions about orders, returns, payments, technical issues — land in one shared mailbox that a small support team sorts by hand.

In that kind of flow it's easy to lose what matters: a VIP customer with a large order gets buried between spam and routine questions, and some requests sit unanswered for days. Speed and priority depend on who happened to open the inbox and when.

Problem

The main problems before automation:

• every request goes into one inbox and is sorted manually — slow, inconsistent and impossible to scale;
• there's no customer context at hand — a VIP is easily mistaken for an ordinary request;
• there's no clear owner: a request "hangs" in the shared mailbox until someone picks it up;
• nobody tracks deadlines — overdue tickets are noticed after the fact, once the customer is already unhappy;
• critical requests (a large order, a payment problem) wait in line with everything else and go cold;
• lost time and lost customers are lost money.

Solution

An end-to-end automation that removes manual sorting of the mailbox. Every request from the inbox goes straight into the system, where AI determines the category, the priority and the responsible owner, and the result flows in two directions: a record in a single request database (Google Sheets) and an instant notification to the owner in Slack.

The key element is AI classification: the model doesn't just assign a priority, it explains its decision in a few sentences — why the request is urgent and who it concerns. That way the manager sees the logic and can trust the assessment.

SLA control runs alongside it: every request has a deadline attached, and if time runs out the system escalates the ticket on its own — first a reminder to the owner, then the team lead, then the director. The system watches the clock, not a person.

Process

How the system works — step by step: