Has a company’s customer support team ever passed you around from agent to agent, making you repeat your request multiple times before you got a resolution?
If your answer is yes, then you understand firsthand the effects of poor customer escalation management.
Customer support escalations typically occur due to inadequate knowledge, heavy workload, or unavailability of the engineer handling the issue. In worst-case scenarios, a case is escalated if a frustrated customer asks to speak to someone else.
A support escalation matrix is a great way for companies to create an optimal customer service escalation process and avoid slow, stressful issue resolution. It enables your support team to collaborate on resolving customer concerns in real time—boosting retention rates and minimizing churn.
A customer support escalation matrix is a roadmap or flowchart that shows how a support request should be handled if the customer support engineer in charge is unable to resolve it.
Outside of customer support, an escalation matrix can also refer to the escalation framework for internal tickets used by other departments like sales, human resources, project management, and more.
An escalation matrix equips support engineers to transfer customer conversations to team members who can resolve them quickly—speeding up the overall resolution process and boosting customer satisfaction. The matrix works within both B2C and B2B contexts, but in this piece, we’ll be focusing on B2B support escalations.
An escalation matrix details exactly when a customer service representative should escalate an issue to a higher level or a more skilled colleague. Specifically, it categorizes escalated issues and assigns them to the right personnel, highlighting how long each person has to solve the customer’s problem before transferring it to yet another team member.
The template below illustrates comprehensive escalation procedures that are time sensitive, level based, and expertise dependent.
Greg Johnson
Growth Marketing Manager, SupportLogic
