How do you escalate a customer issue to another team?

Proactiveness is the key to handling escalations. Customer success, service & support teams often have a sense of when a situation is going to worsen. It is important to give a heads-up to the relevant internal teams at that very point so that when things do escalate, you have the right support.

First of all, as a support manager, contact the head of the IT department and request all the tools support needs to solve problems without the intervention of developers. You will be surprised, but in this way, you can reduce the number of tickets created by support by 5-10 times. Each support person should be a first-line tester. After checking everything that the client describes, the support agent often solves the problem himself. Smart guys work in this department ;) If the help of other departments is inevitable, do not forget that they did not communicate with the client. All the information collected and the test result must be added to the ticket, you can also add your opinion about the causes of the error, it may be correct!

I usually try to solve it by myself but if it doesn't work: 1- I prepare them that there is a better team to solve their issue. 2- I explain the issue to the concerned team. 3- I try to give the concerned team an idea about the customer personality and the best way to handle him. 4- i prepare them to merge the call.

Additionally, I would like to say, after gathering all this information, first do a triage meeting with the respective teams including support, engineering, sales etc. So it will give you a clear picture about the situation and you can take the further decision very easily and it could avoid escalation.

Escalation to another department should always be the last option because you lose control of the overall progress of the issue. You as a support representative are still responsible for keeping the customer informed, so you would like to have control over the progress of the issue.

Perfectly explained. We are following the same process. Firstly make a problem statement in the word file including all of this necessary information and attach it with the case and share the case number with the respective teams, so anyone can track it at anytime and add the points too if it is necessary.

As support organizations, also other departments have processes for escalations. Therefore, there needs to be commonly agreed processes and internal OLAs between teams to handle these situations. This includes seamless integration into tooling. For example with us at Basware, we have a technical integration between the support tool and the tool that our R&D Department is using. This way the information flows both ways and the whole thing is measurable.

Communication is a vital skill in any situation, but especially in escalations. When you communicate with your customers, you want to follow the TEACH framework, which stands for: Timely Empathetic Accurate Consistent Honest By following the TEACH framework, you can communicate effectively with your customers and build trust and loyalty.

Escalations are inevitable, but they can also be valuable learning opportunities. By documenting, sharing and learning from escalations, we can prevent them from happening again in the future. This is how we can grow from our mistakes and improve our performance.

100% agree. I would just add that before escalating the issue, it’s needed to question the customer to have the most of details, sometimes it’s just a kind of misunderstanding. For me, a customer support representative must have an overhaul vision on the process in the company, not only the process of his own department. This is the first thing I look for when I join a company : where is the global process ? 😊