We’ve all been there. A customer reaches out with a baffling technical issue that no one on the team has encountered before.
The result?
That ticket languishes at the top of the queue, leading to a frustrated customer and a frustrated support team.
That’s a sign that your ticket escalation system needs some work. A well-defined escalation process should assign a ticket to the right person or team so that they can obtain the information needed to resolve it.
In the meanwhile, normal tickets (like “How can I exchange these for a different size?” or “What does your company actually do?”) are coming in all the time. You don’t want these overlooked in the queue because your team is too busy handling escalated cases.
Here’s how to set up an escalation system that works for your team.
What is a ticket escalation system?
A ticket escalation system is a structured process to manage and prioritize customer issues that require specialized attention or intervention.
This system helps ensure that the appropriate personnel promptly address and resolve complex or critical problems.
Escalation can happen for several reasons:
Ticket complexity. The issue requires specialized knowledge or expertise beyond the capabilities of frontline support agents.
Urgency. The problem is time-sensitive and needs immediate attention from the support team.
Priority. Priority is often determined through urgency, severity, and the impacted customer. An issue causing a critical failure in a high-value customer’s systems will typically be treated with higher priority.
Customer satisfaction: Escalation is necessary to meet customer expectations and ensure their satisfaction with the support experience. Those are the situations where a customer might be really frustrated or if customers are specifically paying for a higher-tier plan to have a faster resolution.
The benefits of a well-oiled ticket escalation system
A ticket escalation system ensures that urgent issues are fast-tracked to the appropriate teams or senior staff.
This is very different from a typical FIFO (first-in-first-out) system in which tickets are prioritized exclusively in chronological order based on when they were created. That might seem fairer, in some situations, but has its disadvantages.
A ticket escalation system should ensure that no critical issue slips through the cracks. This leads to:
Faster resolution times of the most important issues. Promptly identifying and escalating a critical bug that impacts a large portion of your customer base will obviously lead to a much better customer experience.
Higher customer satisfaction. This is especially important when issues are escalated due to ticket complexity. Say your frontline support agents escalate a billing issue requiring more expertise or access. The sooner that ticket is identified, the faster the customer will have it solved.
A more productive support team. A structured escalation process optimizes resource allocation by directing tickets to the most suitable support agents or teams. That means workload is distributed based on expertise while (ideally) reducing the number of touches the ticket needs to get to the right person.
A recent report by Intercom highlights that customer expectations continue to rise.
71% of the surveyed support leaders planned to invest more in AI and automation to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for a top-notch support experience. They also want to do this without seeing their support costs skyrocket.
Starting with ticket escalation is one way to get there – because it ensures you define your priorities based on what will have the most impact on your customers.
Getting started with ticket escalation in Zendesk
The great news is that Zendesk has a ton of features to implement a solid escalation system. They offer things like AI, automation, and intelligent routing to keep things as streamlined as possible.
At Swifteq, our Triggers+ and Zendesk ChatGPT integration apps can take those processes to the next level.
The only challenge is in designing that system for your business and then implementing it in a way that makes sense in Zendesk.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
1. Define when a ticket should be escalated
What qualifies a ticket for escalation? Is it the customer’s status, the type of issue, or how long it has been sitting in your queue?
Defining very clear factors that trigger an escalation is the first and most important step. Typical situations that lead to an escalation are:
Troubleshooting and bug reporting. Often, the first layer of troubleshooting might be handled by your tier 1 staff but then escalated to a specialized technical team. In these cases, having great escalation macros that define the levels of information required for hand-off can be useful.
Critical issues like a system outage. Many tools have real-time alerts built in to recognize when there’s a sudden and unexpected increase in incoming tickets about an issue. These often need to be escalated to a product team, and you might have an incident response process that also determines how you communicate about it to customers.
Policy or billing discrepancies. These cover that edge case where a customer doesn’t qualify for a refund based on your policy, but it’s maybe still worth providing one. Some teams handle these decisions via billing experts, the finance department or team leads.
Requested by the customer. If a customer refuses to engage with a particular agent because an interaction has gone sideways, there should be an escalation process that allows the agent to hand the case off to another colleague or a supervisor.
Figure out your set of cases where you want to enable quick and easy escalation.
2. Determine your workflow
Workflows are also very context-dependent.
You may have a large department split into specialist teams, each handling different ticket types, so your primary need for escalation is to move tickets across teams.
Or maybe you have a small and mighty team of product experts who can take on anything. The cases requiring formal escalation here might need to be assigned to a different individual or the lead.
Take the set of cases you want or have to escalate and define a workflow for each. For example, for bug reporting, that might be:
The tier 1 agent suggests basic troubleshooting steps and asks for more specific information.
When the customer returns because that issue persists, they have to escalate the case to tier 2. They send a response to the customer with an update and sent it to tier 2.
Tier 2 report it as a bug to the engineering teams.
Then you can look at these steps and decide on the easiest, most convenient way to implement it in Zendesk. Zendesk is very versatile here and will let you tailor your workflows based on whatever works for you.
3. Automate the process
Now you need to implement these workflows in Zendesk. Your options are:
Create macros that automate as many of the steps as possible for your frontline agents, and prompt them to provide the necessary information. Here’s an example of a macro like this.
Use triggers that handle some of these steps automatically. These work well in combination with a macro that adds a tag to identify those tickets. For more complex triggers, you could use the Zendesk ChatGPT Integration app to automate your workflows even more.
Set up automations that trigger when a ticket meets specific criteria. Automations are great for ongoing background processes. For example, if a ticket hasn’t been interacted with for a set number of days, it can be moved to a different queue to alert the team to follow-up. If an SLA is breached, an automation could inform the customer and apologize for the delay.
4. Train your team
Ensure everyone understands how the escalation process works.
That doesn’t mean writing a quick Slack message about it and hoping everyone will remember. It means really taking the time to demo what it looks like in action and explaining why it’s important.
The methods you use depend on many factors, including the size of your team, the typical volume of information they deal with daily, the signal-to-noise ratio of that information, and the processes you have in place to keep the team updated.
Enhancing escalation with ChatGPT
Want to take your ticket automation to the next level?
The Zendesk ChatGPT automation offers a few features that could streamline the escalation process even more by:
Extracting relevant information from tickets and storing it in a ticket field.
Automatically categorizing incoming tickets and detecting customer sentiment, which you could use to flag urgent issues.
Using a few custom prompts that enable you to draft responses and adapt to your use case.
Optimize your escalation system with Swifteq
Implementing a robust and useful ticket escalation system in Zendesk can have a massive impact on your customer service operations.
A well-structured system not only resolves issues more efficiently but significantly boosts the overall customer experience, fostering greater satisfaction and loyalty.
With Swifteq’s innovative tools and integrations, customizing your helpdesk to manage ticket routing and escalation becomes seamless. From creating tailored macros to training your team in effective utilization, Swifteq ensures your escalation system is efficient and effective.
To see how our solutions can elevate your support operations, contact us for a personalized demo about how our tools can transform your support experience.
Anne-Marie is a customer success executive focused on communications and scalability. She specializes in driving process & product improvements, creating thorough and easy-to-understand product documentation, and teaching others how to communicate more effectively through the written word. You can find her on LinkedIn |