Escalation process

An escalation process in a customer service team is important for several reasons:

• Ensures timely resolution of complex conversations
• Prevents overwhelming frontline Agents
• Data and insights for continuous improvement

Setting up an escalation process by transferring between queues

The most common escalation process is creating a queue where agents can transfer conversations when help is needed.

In such an escalation queue, you assign your team leads and/or senior roles who are responsible for the escalated conversations. They can transfer the conversation back to the team with information to help them on what the next steps should be.

Emails are a good example of a channel where conversation needs to be escalated, but these can also come from other channels. This article explains how you can work with "internal email conversations", as transferring closed live conversations as phone calls and chat is not recommended. 

Setting up an escalation process @mention

With the Dixa @mention feature, you could set up a light escalation process, where you ping other users to take action on a conversation.

But since @mentioning someone is not a true ownership change of the conversation, this can only be recommended as a light escalation approach.

The notifications menu in Dixa, which you should where you as an agent has been mentioned, is also missing some key filtering and sorting options that make this process less ideal.

Determine when an escalation is needed

It can be difficult for an agent to know when to escalate a conversation, especially if you are a new hire. It is therefore recommended that you write down an internal process on this with examples, and have that available through the Dixa Knowledge sidebar. Common key reasons for escalations are:

• Technical Complexity
• Unresolved after multiple attempts
• Urgency or Impact
• Policy or Authorization Limits

Furthermore, you should highlight the key information that needs to be filled out by the agent before an escalation is triggered. This can be done by either, or a mix of:

Quick response in an internal note
Create a quick response that an agent can use as a draft to help them write down why the conversation escalated and remind them of various points that are important to elaborate on. 

This can be helpful for the team lead/senior role when they need to de-escalate the conversation.

Conversation attributes
The option to make conversation attributes conditional and mandatory works well with where you want the agents to fill out specific information when escalating. You can even map this with an automation that automatically transfers the conversation to the correct escalation queue based on the attribute added.

How to escalate a conversation as an agent (Queue transfer)

1. Determine if the conversations need to be escalated
2. Add further information that can help the recipient of the escalation in either an internal note and/or conversation attributes
3. Transfer the conversation to the escalation queue (if the primary conversation is not an email, potentially create it as an internal email conversation)

How to de-escalate a conversation as a team lead/senior role (Queue transfer)

1. Claim the conversation from the escalation queue
2. Explain and elaborate on the next steps in an internal note that makes it clear what the agent has to do
3. Transfer the conversation back to its original queue

To help making sure the converstion gets back to the agent who escalated it and get prioritized, you can enable the last agent queue setting

Data insights

Gathering data and insights on an escalation process is important, as it helps your business optimize its support systems, improve customer satisfaction, and ensure more efficient and effective problem resolution. 

Dixa Analytics

Dixa Analytics gives you basic information as to how many transfers to the escalation queue(s) have been made, but you might want to match this information with tags or conversation attributes added to drill further down into the reason for the escalation.

Queue dashboard
From the queue dashboard, by filtering on your escalation queu,e you can get an overview of how much is being escalated.

Agent/team dashboard
From the Agent-/team dashboard, you can get an overview of how many times the conversations are transferred to queues

Dixa Advanced Insights

Dixa Advanced Insights has a more sophisticated representation and visualization of an escalation process. It can be configured by either looking at tags, attributes, or transferring to queues. 

Check out this article for more information