Escalations: The Ticket to Successful Problem Resolution
by Kristin Robertson

Have you ever been to a hospital Emergency Room? ERs have to have a process to quickly evaluate patient problems and escalate any issues quickly and appropriately. Most patients immediately see a triage nurse who evaluates the patient’s condition. If the condition is critical, the patient is whisked into an examination room where a steady parade of medical professionals quickly appear to diagnose the problem and administer the proper medical treatments. These health-care professionals know precisely how to quickly execute their rational, step-by-step triage and escalation process.

As support-center professionals, we can take a lesson from the emergency room.

A well-conceived, well-executed problem escalation process is as essential to the support center’s effectiveness as it is in the ER. Fortunately, we don’t often deal with life-or-death situations, however, a network outage or a bug that brings down a mission-critical application is a very serious and costly event for a company. We need to be ready with an escalation plan that involves a parade of IT professionals, if needed, to solve the problem quickly and efficiently.

In this article, problem escalation refers to the process of involving level two and level three IT or product development experts in solving a customer’s problem.

How to begin?
Escalations start with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that defines the rules used in prioritizing incoming support requests, plus the response and resolution times promised according to the severity of the problem. In the ER, it’s OK to let someone with a bad cold wait longer for medical attention than a patient who can’t breathe and is in need of immediate attention. The same it true in the support center. You have to be able to prioritize support requests according to the impact on the business. To maximize your IT resources and keep your customers productive, problems that affect only one worker must be prioritized lower than, say, a network outage that impacts a large number of customer employees. I’ve included a sample severity matrix that you might find helpful.

Many support centers also keep a VIP (Very Important Person) caller list, usually composed of executives or very important customers, whose problems are automatically prioritized higher than normal.

It is the support center’s responsibility to set the severity level of the service request, and it is not a negotiable issue with a customer. However, if you provide support to external customers, you might want to allow the customer to set a priority level in addition to the by-the-book severity level. In this way, a severity three (normal) problem can be tempered with a customer-set priority one (critical) rating, perhaps because the customer is unable to run a report that they need to meet a deadline. The support center can take the customer-set priority rating into account as they work the ticket.

Severity one requests are usually escalated immediately to a third-level group after the support center gathers a thorough problem description. For non-critical issues, the frontline analyst tries to resolve the issue. If the frontline analyst can’t solve the problem, the ticket is escalated in real-time to a second-level analyst.

Second-level support
Level-two support is provided by senior analysts within the support center. To be effective, senior analysts must be available for questions from the frontline in real time. In large support centers, senior analysts actually staff an internal ACD queue or are available via instant messaging (IM) to immediately help out the support analysts on the phones. In small support centers, they can be available by IM or in a more informal manner.

There are three ways that a senior analyst can help the frontline:

If the frontline analysts are providing web chat support, you can use the same process, however, email support doesn’t demand such real-time assistance, so less formal ways also work. (Please note, however, that customers now expect a quick turn-around to their email inquiries. Therefore, many companies embrace a four-hour response time goal to all email requests.)

This senior analyst either works the problem or recognizes that it must be escalated to third level.

Third-level support
The challenge of third-level support, when it involves other IT or product development units in the company, is that the issue is now out of the support center’s hands, even though they retain final ownership of the problem. The timely resolution of issues escalated to level three requires teamwork and accountability across organizational lines.

One best practice is to retain ownership of all tickets even after they’ve been escalated to other groups in the company. The reason for this practice goes back to customer behaviour. Who did the customer first talk to about this problem -- the support center. Who receives a call from the customer if they need a status on their problem -- the support center. Assuming “cradle-to-grave” ownership of all escalated issues doesn’t mean that the support center has to communicate with the customer. As a matter of fact, it’s usually best if the third-level analyst contacts the customer directly. It does however mean that support center management oversees the resolution process and reports resolution times plus SLA compliance to upper management. It also means that the support center contacts the customer, either via automated email or by phone call, when the escalated issue is closed. This not only creates a warm and fuzzy feeling for the customer, but also ensures that issues are resolved to the customer’s satisfaction and – importantly – adds to the credibility of the support center.

The support center runs both aging reports and SLA-compliance reports. Aging reports summarize, for each level-three escalation group, how many tickets are open and for how long they’ve been open. SLA compliance reports display each escalated problem, its severity, the elapsed time before the level-three response, the elapsed time before resolution, and if that resolution was within SLA guidelines.

Word of warning: Don’t bother to run these reports if there’s no one in the company who will enforce SLA compliance. You must find an executive who will make all third level escalation groups accountable to their SLA commitments. Ideally, the reports you generate should be reviewed on a weekly basis so that the backlog of open tickets can be continually managed. Open ticket reviews are usually conducted at the weekly staff meeting of the afore-mentioned executive, in which all participating groups are represented.

The best escalation plans identify a problem coordinator who gathers a team of IT or product development staff, as needed, to resolve an issue. The problem coordinator is assigned according to the nature of the problem. Often that person has the authority to pull their colleagues off other projects to resolve critical issues.

Following-up and closure
After an escalated support request is resolved, it’s up to the support center to follow-up with the customer to ensure their satisfaction. The follow-up need not always be a phone call; sometimes a friendly email will do.

Most support centers manage this step by creating a “resolved but not closed” status in their call tracking system. This is the status code that the level-three analysts enter when an issue is resolved. The system then routes the ticket back to the support center, preferably to the analyst who originally took the call. Most centers have periods of time during the week when call volumes are low and can schedule out-bound calls. Tickets are closed after the support center has successfully made contact with the customers and ensured their satisfaction.

Support centers can take many lessons from the hospital ER model. It’s our job as support professionals to create and manage efficient escalation procedures for complex issues that can’t be resolved at level one. Your success in this endeavour enhances your image in the eyes of customers and saves your company money.

About the author
Kristin Robertson, President of KR Consulting, Inc., is a consultant to the Help Desk and Technical Support profession. She helps companies increase the efficiency of their support center, save money, and increase their customer loyalty. As both a consultant and trainer, she has worked with companies such as 7-Eleven, Southwest Airlines, Hewlett Packard, Prodigy Communications and CompUSA. Kristin can be reached at 817-577-7030, or krisrob@krconsulting.com.