Do I need a dedicated escalation team?

A common question I get from support executives is whether they need to create a dedicated escalation team. Usually, they ask because they just went through a bad escalation that left some serious scars and/or because they feel they get blindsided by customers who turn very hot on a dime.

Like any good consultant, I tell them the answer is… it depends. Let’s explore pros and cons together.

Do it if

• You have serious, business-threatening situations that are not managed well under your current setup. If that’s the case for you, forget all the caveats described in the “don’t do it” section. You have an emergency and you need to deal with it immediately and tactically–while you set up the formal management and tracking process, if needed.
• Managing escalations is currently done by support managers or CSMs and it interferes with their main mission, whether its operation management or account management. Since escalation management is time-consuming and prone to interrupting the flow of other work, isolating it will help accomplish the very tasks that prevent escalations in the first place.
• You have a good number of escalations that would sustain a full-time role. If you only have a handful, let them be handled by managers or CSMs. In Support, Big is Beautiful. Don’t invest unless you have to.

Don’t do it (yet) if

• You don’t have established criteria for what constitutes an escalation. Instead, go define criteria first. Formal escalation management is resource-intensive so you need to have some kind of a qualification system. Simple issues such as slow responses do not warrant a formal process. Once you have criteria in place, you can reevaluate the need for a dedicated team.
• You don’t track escalations. If you have multiple people handling escalations and no good tracking system, you will likely lean towards a dedicated team just so you can track its work–but a simple tracking mechanism may suffice. Use your CRM to create a special object, or a special case type. Add appropriate metadata and reporting. Once the tracking is in place, you should feel much more in control of what’s going on,
• Your managers dislike managing escalations. If that’s the only objection, train them. Many people think they cannot possibly find satisfaction by managing escalations, but I can confidently state from direct experience that there’s nothing quite as satisfying as turning a customer around.

Note that all the considerations above are about designating dedicated escalation managers. Deciding whether to designate escalation engineers is another matter that depends even more on volume. Add a comment if you want me to cover it in a future post.

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