Escalation Management

What is Escalation Management? Understanding Its Types and Importance in Customer Service

Escalation management is a customer support process that involves identifying issues that are beyond the capacity of the initial support system and redirecting them to a more specialized unit or personnel for an efficient resolution.

Here’s how escalation management works in practice:

Imagine a customer has trouble logging into her Gmelius dashboard, so she contacts the online support team for help. The frontline agent quickly identifies the issue as a technical problem and escalates it to the technical team for resolution. The issue is promptly fixed, and the customer is satisfied.
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Now, let’s look at the three main types of escalation models that businesses can use:

• Hierarchical Escalation: This occurs when an issue is escalated to someone with higher authority, especially if the customer is dissatisfied with the initial support. For instance, a customer might ask to speak with a manager if they feel their issue wasn't handled properly at first contact.

• Functional Escalation: In this model, the issue is escalated to someone with specialized expertise. For example, if a customer experiences a technical issue, a general support rep would escalate the case to the technical team for proper handling.

• Automatic Escalation: Here, automation tools reroute unresolved requests or complaints to the appropriate team based on predefined service-level agreement (SLA) timeframes. This ensures that issues don't fall through the cracks if they aren’t resolved within a certain period.

Depending on your business goals, bulkiness, the types of customer support requests you receive, and your operating budget, you can opt for just one of these models or combine all.

Why is Escalation Management Essential for Good Customer Support?

“First-contact customer support is not always sufficient. Sometimes, your customers require an intensive intervention with equivalent expertise or authority. Not providing that, or taking too long to, can result in poor customer experience”, Michael Melen, Co-Founder at SmartSites, says.

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According to Khoro’s survey, over 42% felt disappointed, whereas another 41% were reportedly angry after their exchange with a company’s support system. Worse still, 67% of customers will switch brands due to bad experiences. Any of these outcomes can result in a negative brand reputation, hurting your business operations and revenue.

Escalation management helps prevent this through:

• Ensuring customers’ complaints receive appropriate attention and importance.
• Smart rerouting of complaints to the right unit. This reduces time to resolution, ensuring a quicker and more accurate response.
• Identifying repetitive tasks that can be automated to free up agents for complex responsibilities.

How to Create an Effective Escalation Management Process

Let’s go through a few steps to create and implement an effective escalation management process for your customer support service.

1. Identify Complaints and Categorize

At this stage, you must identify common complaints in your database and sort them into categories based on the severity or skillset required. For instance, an e-commerce support department might have categories like:

• Product or Service Quality
• Billing and Payments
• Technical Issues
• Shipping and Delivery

Each category can also have subcategories, making it possible to pinpoint the exact problem your customers face even before you respond to their ticket or reroute to an escalations department.

An example is the billing and payment category, which is subdivided into: 

• Disputes: Disputing hours worked, non-release of milestone payments, handling refunds, and managing unresponsive clients.
• Payment Schedule: Automatic payment schedules, chargebacks, fees, and timing.
• Troubleshooting: Mismatched account names, changing Payoneer accounts, collecting funds for deceased freelancers, and troubleshooting payment delays, especially during holidays.

Completing this step helps you create a streamlined escalation matrix, which we will discuss next.

2. Design an Escalation Matrix and Support Tiers

Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches, defines an escalation matrix as “a flowchart or visually represented table that shows how your support team should manage escalation. This includes who should handle what problem categories, how fast they should handle it, and triggering conditions.”

Let’s say we’re using a hierarchical model of escalation. Your matrix would contain the following:

• Levels of Escalation: Based on the severity of the issue or the category and authority within your organization (e.g., low-level issues for frontline support, middle-level severity for senior management, top-level issues for company executives).
• Timeframes: Specified response times for each level.
• Responsibilities: This section details who is responsible at each escalation stage, clarifying who needs to act as the problem escalates.
• Triggering Conditions: Criteria that define when an issue needs to be escalated, such as unresolved complaints or breaches of service level agreements (SLAs).

Gmelius, a leading process automation and email collaboration software, creates an escalation matrix by combining hierarchical, functional, and automatic escalation models. 

Dr. Florian Bersier, our visionary Founder and CEO at Gmelius, emphasizes the importance of a structured approach to customer service. “We organized our levels of customer service escalation into three tiers: Tier 1 handles general questions using AI automation, Tier 2 addresses technical queries with automatic assignments to Customer Success Managers (CSM), and Tier 3 deals with complex issues for key clients, ensuring personalized support.”

“This approach bolstered our customer experience and effectively distributed our team’s workload. For instance, when one of our key clients faced a recurring technical issue, our escalation system swiftly escalated it to Tier 3 and assigned a dedicated CSM to oversee the case. By initiating a live debugging session with both the client and our engineering team, we identified the root cause and resolved the issue within 24 hours, leaving the client impressed by our fast response and clear communication throughout the process”, he adds.

To create an escalation matrix, do the following:

Choose an Escalation Model

While there’s no hard-and-fast rule against using one model, it’s not really advisable due to the changing complexities of customer needs and your growing business reach. So, it’s best to adopt multi-models like Gmelius.

Assign Individuals or Teams to Each Tier of Escalation

Separate your complaint categories into tiers and assign individuals or escalation responsible based on their expertise, hierarchy, and availability. A perfect example was how Gmelius assigned Tier 2 problems to CSMs and Tier 3 to technically dedicated teams.

Define Criterion Using SLA

This is where you define response time per ticket, severity management, and point of escalation. For instance, response time to escalation resolution can be set at 4 hours. Beyond that, the case is automatically escalated to someone of higher ranking (hierarchical) or more expertise (functional). Issue severity can be low, medium, high, or critical—critical often requires immediate escalation to higher management.

3. Equip Employees, Test, and Review Escalated Customer Service Cases

Take your customer support team members through the process before implementing it in real-time. This will allow them to familiarize themselves with it and minimize friction later on.

Reyansh Mestry, Head of Marketing at TopSource Worldwide, suggests you “Test-run the strategy with a small segment of your customer service pipeline and review over a few months to measure impact. Did complaints spike up? Was the response time shorter? Is customer sentiment green from red? How is the team adapting?”

Use insights from these iterative reviews to optimize and streamline your process until it’s able to manage your entire customer support pipeline.

Lastly, equip your team with AI-powered support tools like Gmelius to unify customer complaints, enable smart rerouting via Gmail, and streamline escalation. You can integrate it with a ticketing platform like Hubspot.

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Wrapping Up on Escalation Management

A good escalation management process is essential to providing an adequate customer experience, and blowing it up can negatively impact your business. To build one, first, identify and analyze the complaints you receive and categorize them based on the department responsible.

Follow up with an escalation matrix which tells your support teams how and who to handle a situation based on your escalation models. Finally, update your employees on the process, conduct a sample test to review strategy, and equip your team with appropriate automation to streamline output.