Hand work to the right person
Escalation is a routing decision, not a complaint. When to escalate, when to ignore with a reason, and what each one records.
The job
“I want to get an item to whoever should actually own it, without it disappearing.”
- Sales reps
- Customer success managers
- Sales managers
Work arriving at the wrong person is not a failure of the system so much as a fact about organisations: ownership changes, territories move, and the person best placed to answer is often not the person the record points at. What matters is whether the correction is cheap and visible, or expensive and silent.
The silent version is what most teams have. An item that is not yours gets left, because doing something about it means a message to somebody who may not be the right person either. Leaving it costs nothing today and means nobody ever finds out that a whole class of work is landing in the wrong place.
What it moves
- Escalation speed
- Action completion rate
- Workflow exception volume
The division of labour
What RevTech does, and where you decide
In the product
How to do it
- Step 1 of 4
Decide which of the two this is
There are two different situations and one is much more common than people think. Escalate means the work is real and somebody else should do it. Ignore with a reason means the work should not be done at all — it is a duplicate, it is stale, the account is out of scope. Using escalation for the second is how an item gets passed around three people before somebody finally closes it.
- Step 2 of 4
Escalate to a named person
Escalate opens an assignee dialog: you choose the teammate and the item goes to them with its evidence intact. It does not become a summary of itself on the way.
- Step 3 of 4
Ignore with a reason that means something
Ignoring asks for a reason, and the reason is the whole value of the interaction. "Not relevant" tells nobody anything. "This account is managed by the partner team" is a routing fact somebody can act on, and repeated often enough it is a rule waiting to be written.
- Step 4 of 4
Watch what escalates repeatedly
One misrouted item is noise. The same kind of item escalating from the same role every week is a configuration finding: whoever authored that rule chose the wrong recipient role, and that choice is editable. This is the main way the queue gets better after week two, and it only works if people escalate rather than leaving.
What arrives
What this puts in your Action Center
| Item | What is prepared | How it resolves |
|---|---|---|
| Escalation | The contact history and a suggested message, where a contact is at risk of breaching an SLA | The message flow |
| ManagerFollowUp | The activity timeline and coaching prompts, on a repeated follow-up gap | The contact, on its Journey tab |
What to take away
- Escalate means somebody else should do it. Ignore means it should not be done.
- The reason on an ignore is the only part of it that travels.
- A pattern of escalations from one role is a rule with the wrong recipient, and that is fixable.
Go deeper
The material behind this
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