Best approach to escalation?

[Jarosław Kaczmarek]

Hi

We have a Customer Portal set in the JSM where our internal and external customers can send us requests. The majority of our internal customers are working in the sales and account management teams and as such, they frequently are asked by external clients to escalate issues.

What would be the easiest way for such internal customers to escalate already existing JSM issue?

Case example: An external customer has created an issue in the portal but he did not hear from our team for a while, so went and started bothering his assigned account manager. He gave him a link to his case and expects the account manager to escalate this thing with us.

Conditions:

• We do not want to give away additional JSM licenses (or to give away 20 of them for that matter)
• The escalation route is simple enough so the non-tech user can follow it

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Build it into the workflow for the customer - literally, let them have an "escalate" option on the request so they can yell for help when things are stuck. 

The issue behind the request will probably need to have its workflow modified if you do escalation like most people do.  Most add an "escalated" status to the flow, and get the agents to see it as the same as any other "in progress (with agent)" type status.  But some have the transition loop back to where it was before, actually just setting a field to say "customer escalated this" and maybe firing emails off to the account manager and agent.

We often see rules on this - I quite like the one that says "the escalate button is only available if the issue has not been updated for X working hours/days".