Customer Escalation Management: Turning Challenges Into Opportunities

Not every escalated issue demands the same level of priority. However, every customer expects a prompt resolution after escalation.

With a limited customer support team, you need to manage these escalations effectively to uphold customer expectations. Prioritizing escalations and assigning them to the right team requires a lot of work. Manual processes work when managing limited escalations, but you need a structured process to work with them at scale.

Customer escalation management provides a structured approach to managing escalations at scale and delivering desired solutions. It includes automating specific workflows to save time while maintaining a transparent process to address issues at scale.

When you manage customer escalations with a systematic approach, this naturally builds trust in your brand and reduces churn. When cemented with consistently great experiences, this trust builds customer advocacy that drives referrals to your business.

Overall, managing escalations is a significant part of a business’ customer service strategy. Let’s explore how to win at it.

What Is Escalation Management?

Customer escalation management is a strategy for addressing customer issues that regular support channels cannot fully solve. It involves identifying the cause of the problem and assigning specialized teams to solve it.

This shows that you take ownership of a customer’s requests, building trust and promoting customer loyalty. It minimizes any negative impact on your reputation due to perceived negligence in supporting customers with unique problems. Although you might not have neglected an issue, your customers’ perceptions are beyond your influence if they don’t get the service they expect.

Defining a process to manage escalation and carrying it out transparently shows your commitment to creating positive customer outcomes. Such a structured approach increases resolution speed and quality.

A typical workflow of customer escalation management includes key elements like issue detection, assignment to the right team, and set protocols for communication and follow-ups. The first and most crucial step is knowing when to escalate. If you do this too often, it will swamp your team with escalations that might not need expert support. However, not doing it often enough might be perceived as negligence regarding customer concerns.

The key is to maintain a good balance. Define triggers that qualify for escalation, such as prolonged resolution time (say, 24 hours), high customer dissatisfaction, or customers asking specifically to escalate the issue.

Types of Escalations

When determining which issues to escalate, having a clear classification system helps ensure the right level of attention and resolution. Typically, you can categorize escalations into the following types.

Functional escalation

Functional escalation requires agents to transfer customer interactions to a department specializing in the issue. For example, if there’s a problem related to product X, it goes to a junior developer. The developer finds that the core of the problem is integrating product X into product Y.

Functional escalation would add a junior developer at product Y into the loop. This makes issue resolution faster.

Hierarchical escalation

With hierarchical escalation, the escalated issue goes to professionals who have a higher authority than the agents currently dealing with the customer. Customers usually ask for hierarchical escalation when the customer support representative doesn’t solve their problems as expected.

In some cases, agents escalate the issue themselves. This usually happens in situations where they need approval from a higher level authority to deliver a desirable solution to a loyal customer.

Automated escalations

As the name suggests, automatic escalations get triggered automatically based on critical incidents like service level agreement (SLA) breaches, sentiment analysis, or issue severity. For example, if a support ticket is due for a long time, assigning it to senior staff can bring an immediate resolution.

Customers can also trigger escalations when they report severe problems, such as a security incident or a privacy breach. In such situations, the ticket is directly escalated to senior management or the company’s security department.

Challenges in Escalation Management

Even where customer escalation management processes exist, specific challenges may present stage hurdles in their smooth execution. Such challenges primarily relate to a lack of consistency, escalation volumes, poor communication standards, and inadequate resources.

Process inconsistency

The process execution at a team level might be inconsistent with another department’s workflow. This results in delays, unnecessary confusion, and often, customer dissatisfaction. Such inconsistencies often add to the friction that different cross-functional teams experience while collaborating on customer issues.

Here are some examples of a few inconsistencies that cause disruptions in the escalation management process:

• Updates are shared only on specific platforms like email or Slack channels and remain hidden from stakeholders who are not a part of that platform. This increases confusion.
• Severity levels are undefined, which keeps the teams from addressing severe issues that often get misunderstood.
• Roles and responsibilities are unclear, leading to multiple handoffs, and team members assume someone else is managing the issue, leading to miscommunication and a lack of follow-ups.

High escalation volumes

When there’s less clarity on which issues to escalate, the expert team might get a large volume of issues. This overwhelms the team beyond their capability and stretches resources thin, hampering service quality. Customers get the desired service, but not how they expected it.

It’s essential to control the flow of incoming queries you drive toward the escalation management professionals.

Poor communication between teams

Not every person on your team is equally capable or equipped to resolve critical customer queries. When customer escalations come in, you need a way to collaborate not only with your team but across your company. This makes it easier to take care of routing and assigning the right people to resolve issues faster.

However, the escalation departments are largely siloed, and such transparency in communication is tough to achieve. This irritates the customer, and it is equally frustrating for customer service agents when communication blocks them from delivering the best service.

Nextiva’s Unified Communication as a Service removes these silos, enabling agents, customer service escalation teams, and experts to collaborate seamlessly.

Inadequate resources

In some situations, the team might lack the tools to meet customer service expectations. For example, customers navigating multiple handoffs won’t want to keep repeating their issues. If asked to do so, it spoils their experience.

If you’ve integrated your contact center software with customer relationship management software, the team can go through previous interactions. This keeps the conversation directed toward the context the agent wants to maintain without losing customers due to frustration.

How to Set Up an Escalation Management Process

Below are a few steps to help you set an effective escalation management process for your organization.

1. Determine escalation criteria

This will determine when an escalation will happen and how it will be triggered. Based on the nature of your business, the internal SLAs will vary for different companies. Here’s an overview of what they might be:

• A customer makes a third attempt to contact customer support and doesn’t get connected to any team member.
• A threshold isn’t met for scores on customer satisfaction surveys.
• A product isn’t delivered within 48 hours of purchase.

Optimal contact center software automatically triggers an escalation procedure to communicate the issue to the relevant stakeholders. The service manager gets a notification to contact the customer within the next two hours. A junior customer service manager will handle the query in priority. The service ticket is assigned to someone with much more expertise or the authority to assist customers in the best way possible.

This system would analyze the escalations based on severity and prioritize them accordingly. Organizations usually create an escalation matrix to help the team prioritize issues and determine a relevant course of action. This contains details such as when to pass a ticket to another department or how to perform the handoff seamlessly.

2. Outline escalation paths

Ensure that you clearly define the escalation pathways for front-line support agents and senior management. People should have 100% clarity on whom to assign the ticket if they cannot solve the issue.

Set a communication channel to collaborate internally. Nextiva’s contact center management software features allow agents to collaborate seamlessly with the broader team. It maintains clear visibility on what’s going on and who the go-to person is to approach for anything related to the customer’s issue.

You need to define a clear hierarchy so agents feel more supported when tricky issues come their way. That way, you take care of the customer experience while ensuring a structured process for agents.

3. Leverage technology

Choose the right technology to monitor SLAs to address customer complaints preemptively. For example, a sentiment analysis tool of communication software can pick up when an agent’s experience turns toward frustration.

It can automatically escalate the issue to add service managers who can drive the experience toward satisfaction. Beyond sentiment analysis, you can program an AI chatbot to automatically escalate the problem when it grows beyond set SLAs. The chatbot will register the issue, and if it outgrows the set SLA (for example, the refund is not processed within seven days), it will assign the problem to the relevant department, thereby serving customers better.

4. Train stakeholders

Usually, issues that come with escalations demand greater care than others. Your staff needs to be well-trained and skilled to manage such escalations and customer needs effectively.

Here are a few escalation management skills and soft skills that you can train your staff on to handle customer issues effectively:

• Empathy and emotional intelligence. Help staff respond patiently and with care to customer frustration in order to rebuild trust.
• Problem-solving and critical thinking. Perform root cause analysis of the escalation and provide long-term solutions.
• Time management. Ensure escalations are resolved within SLA commitments.
• Collaborative leadership. Promote cross-departmental teamwork to handle complex cases seamlessly.
• Communication skills. Help staff to deliver clear, concise updates to customers while maintaining professionalism.

5. Monitor and improve

Review escalation trends regularly to improve on areas that still need care. This includes fixing workflows based on performance and feedback. Some contact center software comes with call recording and transcription features that come in handy while assessing current processes and ensuring informed decision-making regarding improvements.

This assessment should ideally happen consistently to help the customer service team serve customers better. If reviewing it continuously is tricky, businesses should review the set workflows periodically to make changes toward improvements.

Best Practices for Managing Escalations

Following these practices can help you deliver a good experience that can potentially turn a frustrated customer into a satisfied one.

Prioritize first contact resolution

First Contact Resolution (FCR) solves customer queries when they make the first contact. This reduces the need for escalations and helps avoid a frustrating experience for the customers.

Modern customers prefer to solve their issues through self-service channels or a knowledge base. However, they expect their problems to be handled promptly when they do contact customer service. Prioritizing FCR takes care of customer issues the way customers expect. There’s less need for escalations, helping the team manage other critical escalations promptly.

Did you know? Nextiva recommends nine best practices to increase first contact resolutions when customers reach out to support teams. Explore these best practices through this video:

Integrate feedback loops

Analyze any customer feedback delivered across channels. These are the key elements in improving processes to offer a much better customer experience. You need a tool to aggregate this feedback when managing customer queries at scale, as not all feedback will come from your CSAT survey. It’s scattered throughout the customer interaction in the communication history.

Look for a solution that can aggregate all this feedback in one place, making it easier to use input in agents’ training. Conversational AI software is a go-to solution for capturing customer feedback from the interaction history.

Ensure cross-department collaboration

Encourage interdepartmental collaboration on customer issues with transparency. This shares the accountability of an escalation among different teams, keeping them invested in collaborating to find a solution.

With transparency, all teams are encouraged to participate in helping customers seek the right solution. In some companies, this is directly reflected in the team’s performance reviews. However, this also leads to customer success and achieves a faster resolution.

Keep document escalation histories

Keep escalations documented. Whenever you have a similar case, you can refer to the type of resolution offered and apply the same input to deliver a much faster solution. This makes issue resolution quick and easy, giving customers a good experience, even when they have a complex issue.

For example, if an upgrade or downgrade deletes a customer’s account history, you can refer to a similar situation to look for a possible root cause. This will speed up the analysis process, empowering you to find a solution faster. Moreover, this documentation is also useful for the training process.

Encourage proactive communication

Communication plays a significant role in managing escalation. How you communicate with your customers determines how you help them find a resolution. This interaction should weigh all factors required to ensure escalation management doesn’t backfire.

For example, you must demonstrate transparency and commitment to resolving customer queries. If you constantly say you’re working on the problem, a customer might perceive that their request is being stalled. Instead, you need to communicate what’s happening and how soon you can address the situation.

If you’re collaborating cross-functionally, it is good practice to involve the teams in customer communication as well. That way, you can ensure customers have 100% clarity on what’s going on, and if they have any confusion, they can directly ask the concerned expert from the other teams.

Such an approach shows you’re leaving no stone unturned in assisting customers to find issue resolution as soon as possible. Transparency goes a long way in establishing trust that later translates into a memorable customer experience once the issue has been resolved.

Manage Escalations Easily With Nextiva

Since customer interactions are scattered over different channels, it’s tricky to aggregate all communication history in one place. This is a highly likely scenario, especially when managing customer escalations. For example, a customer may initially use a phone to reach out, then rely on email, and finally, contact you via social media. These customer conversations exist on different channels: phone, email, and social media.

How difficult is it to aggregate contextual substance from these interactions across channels? Not so much if you’re managing only a few customers. However, when you’re managing several customers, you need an automated way to aggregate context from these interactions or chat history.

This is where Nextiva comes in. It consolidates omnichannel communication, customer data, and chat history to streamline escalations. The software comes with the ability to analyze sentiments and SLA breaches in real time, making you more proactive in detecting potential escalations.

Try Nextiva. It’s adaptable to businesses of all sizes and supports seamless growth without sacrificing service quality.