Workflow recipe: Managing your escalation queue

What's my plan?

All Suites | Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Support | Team, Professional, or Enterprise

When you deal with a lot of customers, it's very easy for some of the more upset ones to fall through the cracks. More often than not, you can prevent upsetting customers by keeping track of your escalated tickets. This support tip will help you create triggers to escalate your tickets more effectively.

Custom triggers are only available on the Team, Professional, and Enterprise plans.

This tip contains the following sections:

Creating your group

Creating your triggers

Creating your view

Creating your group

Before you can create your triggers, you need to create an Escalations group.

In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar, then select Team > Groups.

Click Add group.

Name the group Escalations, then select agents you want to handle escalated tickets.

When you're finished, click Save.

Creating your triggers

You can manage your escalated tickets with three types of triggers. For more information on creating custom triggers see, Streamlining workflow with ticket updates and triggers.

The trigger types are:

Escalation triggers

Bad CSAT triggers

Agent touch triggers

Escalation triggers

Your first trigger will escalate tickets based on the text your requester uses in their ticket.

Create a new trigger and enter a name

Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add the below conditions:

Ticket > Status category | Less than | Solved

Ticket > Tags | Contains none of the following | escalated_customer

Note: It is important to add this trigger so you create a nullifying condition to prevent the trigger from running over and over again.

Under Meet ANY of the following conditions, add Ticket > Comment Text | Contains at least one of the following words | Enter common words or phrases upset customers use

Under Actions, add the below:

Ticket > Add Tags | escalated_customer

Ticket > Priority | Urgent

Ticket > Group | Escalations

Click Create trigger

Bad CSAT triggers

Your second set of triggers will escalate tickets with poor satisfaction ratings both with and without comments.

Without comments

Create a new trigger

Name the trigger Bad CSAT without comment

Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add the below conditions:

Ticket > Status category | Less than | Solved

Ticket > Tags | Contains none of the following | Bad_CSAT_no_comment

Ticket > Satisfaction | Is | Bad

Under Actions, add Ticket > Add tags | Bad_CSAT_no_comment

Click Create trigger

With comments

Create a new trigger

Name the trigger Bad CSAT with comment

Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add the below conditions:

Ticket > Status category | Less than | Solved

Ticket > Tags | Contains none of the following | Bad_CSAT_with_comment

Ticket > Satisfaction | Is | Bad with comment

Under Actions, add Ticket > Add tags | Bad_CSAT_with_comment

Click Create trigger

Agent touches

There is one last important trigger to add. Adding a trigger based on more than three agent touches is important because statistically, the chances of having a great customer satisfaction rating drop drastically after three customer interactions with the same requester.

Create a new trigger

Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add the below:

Ticket > Status category | Less than | Solved

Ticket > Tags | Contains none of the following | 3touch_or_more

Ticket > Agent replies | Greater than | 3

Under Actions, add the below:

Ticket > Group | Escalations

Ticket > Add Tags | 3touch_or_more

Click Create trigger

Creating your view

You can now create a view for your Escalations group. Creating a view will enable your agents to easily identify the tickets that need their attention.

Create a new view and enter a name

In Who has access, select Agents in specific groups, then under Choose which groups have access, select Escalations

Note: You want to select this group to prevent agents who do not handle escalations from having access to the tickets.

Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add Ticket > Tags | Enter the below tags:

escalated_customer

3touch_or_more

Bad_CSAT_no_comment

Bad_CSAT_with_comment

Under Group by select Latest Update

Under Order by, select ID

Click Save

This process is going to solve many of your escalations from wasting your time, the customer's time, and everyone's sanity. You can prevent customers from falling through the cracks, by placing an urgent status on them, as well as escalating them to a specific group of agents trained to solve escalated tickets.