Demystify Escalation Management and Reshape Your Support Function with AppExchange Apps

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Every time you struggle with a product return, bill discrepancy, or a glitch, customer service comes to mind. The ultimate goal of every customer service team is to ensure a smooth and seamless experience by quickly and efficiently addressing customers’ issues or grievances. But, what if the issue is the support received itself?

Regardless of how airtight your support is, you cannot please everyone all the time. Occasionally, customers will be unsatisfied with the services received and demand to speak to the higher authorities. Mishandling or overlooking such requests will only pour gas on the fire and negatively affect CX, CSAT, and overall brand image. This is where escalation management kicks in.

Salesforce AppExchange, your one-stop store for all enterprise solutions, offers multiple applications to enable support teams to intelligently prioritize incoming cases and manage support escalations. Visit AppExchange to find an application that empowers support teams to keep support escalations in check. To help you evaluate a solution that perfectly complements your business goals, it is essential to dive deep into the meaning, nature, scope, and significance of escalation management. So let’s get started.

What is Escalation Management?

It is a process by which a customer’s issue or complaint is introduced to a subject-matter expert or senior representative — usually an L2 agent, supervisor, or manager so that an up to par resolution can be provided. In an ideal world, every support team aims for a zero percent escalation rate. However, we are apprised of the fact that the lives of support reps and managers are not this simple.

Fun Fact: The industry standard for customer escalations is 10% or less.

Types of Customer Service Escalations & Escalation Systems

From a customer’s perspective, escalations can be of three types. And speaking of escalation systems, two options are available for your business. Let’s take a look at those.

Customer Service Escalations

1. Issue Escalation: This is a single-topic issue, affecting an individual.
2. Incident Escalation: It encompasses a broader set of issues and is likely to affect a particular team.
3. Account Escalation: This affects the entire organization.

Escalation Systems

1. Functional Escalation: The issue passes to a team or an individual based on their systems knowledge or skills.
2. Hierarchical Escalation: The issue moves up a chain of command based on the seniority of an employee.

Why is it Important to Predict & Prevent L2 Escalations?

1. Escalations Balloon Budgets: When you keep escalating a customer complaint from one agent to another, you don’t just add to your customer’s frustration but also to your support resources. From time, workload to support costs, everything shoots up drastically. However, by anticipating escalations and strategically handling them, you can help your agents manage their time efficiently, thus saving yourself a fortune. Fun Fact: TSIA revealed that 28% of CSM’s time is wasted in reactive escalations.
2. Escalations Take a Toll on Agent Productivity: Escalation of common queries due to fragmented knowledge silos and poor findability only draws away L2 agents’ attention from high-value engagements and strategic tasks like agent coaching and training, process improvement, etc. Imagine what a great deal of time and effort you can save by providing a single, unified gateway for disparate silos to your agents. Fun Fact: As per Dimensional Research, 72% of consumers see having to explain their problem to multiple people as poor customer service.
3. Escalations Shoot Up Customer Churn: Irrespective of whether an escalation is under an agent’s control or not, it negatively affects the overall customer experience; peculiarly if mismanaged or overlooked. Critical contact center KPIs, like First Call Resolution (FCR) and Average Handle Time (AHT), directly influence case escalations. Therefore, if these KPIs go south, escalations are likely to soar along with the degree of customer dissatisfaction. Fun Fact: 67% of customer churn is preventable if customer complaints are resolved at the very first time they occur.

5 Best Practices to Curtail Support Escalations

1. Delineate an Escalation Management Policy for SLA Breaches
   Since Service Level Agreement (SLA) lays out metrics to measure the quality of service, it is important to predefine the remedies or penalties for not meeting the specified standards. Additionally, you should define multiple SLA policies to ensure timely solutions to customers in such scenarios. After all, why let a customer be afflicted by the negligence of an agent and affect your entire bottom line? A robust escalation mechanism kickstarts by understanding the context and sentiment of a complaint. Then, it assigns the case to the most suitable agent who can mellow out the situation. Let’s say grievances raised on social media are of high priority and call for immediate attention of the senior-most manager whereas, other lower priority cases can be looked after by team leads or senior agents.
2. Chalk Out an Escalation Matrix
   A well-established structure is required to manage escalations at different levels. This is where the escalation matrix comes into the picture. It defines an escalation path, i.e., who to contact for various types of issues (like technical help, delivery problems, resource shortages, etc.) on management level.
3. Perform Root Cause Analysis
   By identifying the underlying driver of escalations, you can keep a rein on future escalations. Let’s say, an escalation was overlooked because an agent was bombarded with work. You could steer clear of this escalation by optimally distributing the workload between agents.
4. Leverage Smart Applications
   With the right tech stack at your disposal, you can have a perfect blend of automation and smart manual. This way, you can free up your support mavens from mundane tasks and empower them to accomplish complex and high-value engaging tasks with all the ease. For example, Escalation Predictor by SearchUnify, an application available on the AppExchange, automates inquiry routing. It learns words and phrases commonly used in inquiries and then predicts the tone and nature of the inquiry to identify customer intent. In the end, it triages the inquiry to the best agent from the get-go to avoid any further escalations.
5. Train Your Team to be Empathetic
   As Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Although conflicts are inevitable, the way you handle them is what really makes all the difference. If you turn a blind eye to customer resent or dilly-dally for too long, you are only making an unhappy customer unhappier. So, train your support team to be empathetic and communicate with absolute clarity. The key here is to be as transparent as possible, give realistic timelines, and rational resolution ETAs.

Conclusion

Escalation is bad news. But, the good news is that you can mitigate the risks by dealing with them right. The best strategy is to keep escalations to a bare minimum. For that, you need to equip your agents with the right tech stack and ensure an ultimate agent desktop wherein processes and workflows are smooth and seamless. Apps like SearchUnify, available on AppExchange, can certainly help you with that. They leverage ML and NLP to perform sentiment analysis and give valuable case insights for effective and efficient escalation management.

Check out SearchUnify and other AI-powered solutions that facilitate intelligent triaging and sentiment analysis on AppExchange and transform the end-to-end employee experience.