Escalations
An escalation is the process of moving a customer issue from the front-line owner to a more senior or specialized resource when it cannot be resolved at the current tier.
Common triggers
- SLA breach (or imminent)
- Customer requests "speak to a manager"
- Issue requires deeper technical or product knowledge
- Bug confirmed and needs engineering involvement
- Customer is at risk of churn or has filed a complaint
Escalation paths
- Tier 1 → Tier 2 / specialist — for technical complexity
- CSM → CS manager → VP — for relationship-level escalation
- Support → Engineering — for product bugs
- Standard → Critical incident — for outages or data issues
Tracking escalations
Volume of escalations is a key support metric. Healthy support orgs target under 5% of tickets escalated. Higher than that means front-line enablement gaps.
How BlueHill helps
Escalations flag automatically when SLAs breach or specific keywords appear ("furious", "cancel", "lawyer"). Internal notes keep the escalation context visible to everyone in the chain without exposing it to the customer.