Escalation Management Done Right: When to Act & What to Avoid 

As customers increasingly expect lightning-fast and seamless resolutions to service issues, more brands are introducing self-service options like AI-powered chatbots and knowledge bases.

While these options can help some customers, many customer service issues still need to be resolved by human agents — and many will require escalation. A recent Gartner study found that only 14% of customer service and support issues are fully resolved with self-service options, meaning that 86% of tickets must be escalated at least once to a human agent.

Escalation management is essential to handling customer service issues effectively and promptly, both of which are critical to maintaining high customer satisfaction rates.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the key components of effective escalation management, including best practices and procedures to ensure smooth issue resolution for support staff and customers alike.

What Is Escalation Management?

Escalation management is the strategic process of routing unresolved and complex customer concerns to the next level of support staff. It ensures that service teams are meeting customer expectations while thoroughly resolving issues, minimizing frustration, improving customer retention management, and potentially ensuring that you’re meeting service-level agreements (SLAs).

Escalation management processes should be defined in three ways:

• When to escalate issues
• Which types of issues should be escalated to specialized teams
• Which teams or team members to escalate different issues to

For example, a customer experiencing technical issues may first try to troubleshoot their problem with a self-service portal. When the knowledge base doesn’t work, they contact general customer support. If the first agent can’t help because the issue is too complex, they’ll route the ticket to IT support, who can hopefully resolve the issue.

When Should Customer Support Agents Escalate an Issue?

Not every customer service issue needs to be escalated. Ideally, your ticketing system and interactive voice response navigational menu should correctly route customers to the right team to help customers, and agents should have thorough training so they can effectively resolve most support requests they receive.

However, some issues will inevitably need escalation, and you should account for this in your customer service strategy. Teach support agents how to recognize the following key indicators that an issue should be escalated.

1. The issue is beyond the agent’s authority or expertise

If a customer service agent lacks the resources, permissions, or expertise to resolve a customer’s problem, escalation is necessary. Agents must understand what they can offer so they can quickly route customers to the next level of support quickly. Struggling to resolve an issue can waste the customer’s time and increase frustration.

This is particularly common with businesses or contact centers that may have technical help desks, security concerns, or financial approvals. Credit card companies, for example, may need to route callers concerned with stolen cards directly to agents in fraud or security departments.

2. The customer is increasingly frustrated or upset

Customer service expectations are high, with many clients expecting fast and complete issue resolution from businesses. Customers may sometimes be frustrated when they first get in touch, but you can watch for signs that they’re becoming more upset or losing confidence in the resolution.

If agents are unable to resolve issues quickly for particularly frustrated customers — or if the customer is clearly agitated with the first-level resolution — it’s time to involve a manager or a higher-level agent.

For instance, if a client calls their insurance company complaining that they were billed for a medical procedure that should have been included, they’ll be frustrated if the first support agent can’t explain why they were billed. It’s better to escalate the issue to someone who can clarify the policy’s benefits, as this person could potentially explain that the doctor’s office used the wrong diagnostic or procedure code and will know how to resolve the issue.

3. An SLA deadline is at risk

SLAs may define a specific time frame for resolving support issues. As a result, response times, resolution rates, and key customer service metrics must be closely tracked to ensure compliance with your SLAs and to maintain customer satisfaction. If an issue likely won’t be resolved within that agreed-upon timeframe, it must be escalated.

It’s also important to track other key customer service metrics, whether they’re stipulated in your SLA or not. These metrics can impact overall customer satisfaction and average resolution times in several ways:

• Customer effort score
• Average wait time
• Average handle time
• First call resolution
• First response time

4. A widespread technical issue is affecting multiple customers

Significant technical problems like system failures, service disruptions, and product issues can quickly impact multiple customers.

When this happens, it often requires functional escalation to the technical team. First-level support agents can inform customers that there’s a system-wide issue, but the expertise of IT and technical support teams is needed to resolve larger issues and assist customers.

These teams should also conduct a root cause analysis to understand why the issue happened and prevent future occurrences. Not only will this improve the customer experience by reducing potential technical issues moving forward, but the ability to explain to customers why it happens and what you’re doing to prevent outages in the future can build trust and alleviate potential client concerns.

Best Practices for Effective Escalation Management

Once an issue is escalated, knowing how to handle it well makes all the difference. These are the best practices to keep in mind for effective escalation management that will improve customer experience.

Prioritize the most critical issues first

Not all escalations are urgent. Customers who call an insurance company for rush approval for an upcoming urgent surgery, for example, should take priority over customers who have questions about the coverage of annual blood work.

As a result, it’s pivotal to prioritize critical issues first. Customer service escalation processes should use an escalation matrix to determine the urgency of each issue, ensuring that each is handled according to concern severity.

Make the handoff as seamless as possible

While escalations are inevitable, you should make them as smooth as possible — and that means capturing as much information as you can from the initial interaction so that customers don’t have to reiterate their issue. Being asked to repeat themselves multiple times is cited as the most frustrating aspect of getting support for 66% of customers, along with waiting on hold.

You should require agents to take careful notes and document all important aspects of a customer’s concern so the next agent has a solid head start on issue resolution — and the customer doesn’t need to start explaining from the beginning.

Keep the customer informed throughout the process

Lack of communication increases dissatisfaction. Even if your team is working on issue resolution behind the scenes, there’s no way for the customer to know that.

Regular follow-up messages should be sent to manage customer expectations better, especially for complex issues that take more than a single phone call to resolve. This should include information on what’s contributing to the holdup, what you’re doing to resolve the issue, and when customers can expect to hear back from you.

Define a clear resolution path

Proper ticket routing ensures that all customer issues are assigned to the right team or point of contact. This includes when you need to leverage hierarchical escalations to managers who have more authority for complex decision-making or a functional escalation to specialists with more expertise to resolve certain types of problems.

Structured escalation matrices prevent confusion, ensuring support agents know where to send customers. This can prevent them from unnecessarily being bounced around between multiple departments and increases overall efficiency.

Use a tracking system to monitor escalations

Automated escalation procedures can streamline issue routing, prevent accidentally overlooked tickets, and facilitate ticket tracking.

AI-powered chatbots and self-service tools are an exceptional first line of defense, for example, but they can’t prevent all escalations. When issues do need to be escalated, your customer service software should ensure that customers are routed to the correct team, assigned to a specific team member, and tracked with a ticket until the issue is fully resolved.

Train your team on de-escalation techniques

Most customers calling or messaging your support team have an issue that needs to be resolved, so they may already be frustrated from the beginning.

Fortunately, many customer service escalations can be prevented with a combination of problem-solving skills and de-escalation techniques that help agents deal with difficult customers and complex issues.

This should include teaching all agents how to access the information and resources they need to resolve more customer concerns. You should also provide training on call center soft skills, which can include active listening to better understand a customer’s core concerns and reduce escalation-requiring frustration.

Common Escalation Challenges (and How to Fix Them)

Even the best-planned customer service strategies can struggle with escalation processes and practices, negatively impacting the customer experience. Let’s discuss the three most common escalation challenges and explore how to resolve them (or prevent them altogether!)

1. Too many escalations overwhelm the team

Automated workflows and ticket routing can sometimes cause specialized teams to become inundated with customer support requests that first-level agents could have resolved. This ultimately slows response and resolution times for everyone, including the callers who need to speak to those high-level support team members.

If a bank routes all callers with loan questions to a loan officer, for example, those officers may end up helping callers who just need to make a payment or check their balance. These callers could have been helped with self-service options or first-level agents instead of taking up significant time from specialized team members.

Solution: Automatic escalation processes should be used carefully and only when necessary. Tiered escalation paths help streamline processes while still ensuring that you’re distributing workloads effectively and accurately.

2. Customers lose patience waiting for updates

Some issues take more than a few minutes to resolve. Technical issues may take several hours or even a day to fix, for example. And while resolutions may take time, customers can become increasingly frustrated when they’re left waiting with no response.

Solution: Don’t go radio silent after you read the customer’s concern. Let them know that you’ve received and understood the issue and that you’re actively working on a resolution. Set realistic timelines for when you expect the issue to be resolved and when the customer can expect to get more information from you. This helps manage their expectations.

3. Miscommunication slows down resolution time

Miscommunication can happen easily, including between the customer and the support team or different support team members. Both situations can be frustrating for the customer who just wants a quick resolution.

Solution: Structured escalation management processes should ensure smooth transitions of customer tickets between team members. Such processes should involve keeping accurate records of customer complaints and implementing documented procedures on how to hand off customer tickets during an escalation.

Customer experience solutions like Nextiva can help with this, allowing you to create centralized customer service workflows and leverage features to enable real-time tracking and status updates to keep everyone aligned.

How Nextiva Simplifies Escalation Management

Managing customer escalations doesn’t have to be migraine-inducing. Nextiva’s customer experience solution streamlines the escalation management process, reducing response times and improving customer satisfaction with the following features:

• AI-powered automation: Identify trends and proactively address issues before they escalate.
• Smart workflows: Automatically route customer issues to the right team members quickly for faster and better resolution.
• Omnichannel support: Manage customer interactions across phone, email, chat, and social media in one solution, streamlining escalation to the right agents regardless of which platform customers use to get in touch.
• Holistic customer data: Access past customer interaction and purchase history with CRM integrations to track concerns and offer more personalized resolutions.
• User-friendly dashboards: Enable agents at all levels to access internal knowledge bases and easily escalate issues as needed.
• Real-time analytics: Track key metrics like response time, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction scores to optimize performance with custom dashboards.

With Nextiva, you can not only improve escalation management but also reduce the total number of escalations, enhancing the customer experience. You can speed up resolutions and deliver a seamless customer experience — all in one powerful platform. Get started here. 👇