You have three escalated tickets at once. How do you prioritize?
RoleTechnical Support Representative
DifficultyDifficult
TopicTechnical
Asked at
Why This Is Asked
Prioritization under pressure is a daily reality in support queues, and this question filters for candidates who have an actual method versus those who'd just work first-in-first-out and let SLAs slip.
General Approach
State the criteria you'd prioritize by (severity/impact, SLA deadline, whether a workaround exists) before walking through how you'd sequence the three tickets: naming the criteria first shows structured thinking, not just gut feel.
General Answer
State the prioritization criteria before sequencing anything: business impact and number of people affected, contractual SLA time remaining, and whether a workaround already exists for the user. Rank the three tickets against those criteria rather than by order received. Start work on whichever ticket has the highest impact and least time buffer left. For the other two, send a quick acknowledgment with an honest expected timeframe so those requesters aren't left wondering, and pull in a colleague to help if capacity allows. Reassess if new information changes the risk picture (for example, if a workaround surfaces for one ticket, its priority may drop). Keep a short record of why you sequenced them the way you did, both for accountability and in case you need to explain the decision later.
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