Managing Escalations

As great as your CSM’s are at delighting customers, there are going to be some issues that require back-up from management. While situations like this can be handled in a one-off, reactive manner, creating a well-defined escalation process can have many benefits. In this article we’ll discuss planning and executing escalations, and the benefit that they can have for your organization. (This post focuses on the escalation process. Check out this post for more info on how to handle the event of an escalation call.)

‍Why are you escalating?

The first part of creating an escalation process is determining which customers should get escalated, and for what reasons. While you can ideally deliver excellent service and personal time with each of your customers, the fact of the matter is that everyone has a limited number of hours to devote to escalations. Some possible reasons for escalations is that your CSM believes that a high value (or potential value) customer is a very high churn risk, or has a large presence in your space. Even then, the CSM should try exhaust all other options before entering a customer into the escalation workflow. 

‍Whose job is it?

The next step is to determine who will handle the escalation. This first level will typically be the person that the CSM reports directly to. For many customers, this will be enough. For larger an/or more influential customers, it may make sense to skip a level and escalate to a director or VP level customer. Again, to understand which customers should be eligible for a higher level escalation, you need to determine how valuable said customer is. This can be accomplished by a simple look into their spend or potential spend, but should also include the sentiment of the rep that is managing the relationship (i.e. this customer is a huge advocate or refers a lot of business, etc.)

‍How do you track it?

Finally, tracking escalations is a great way to identify shortcomings in your process or materials, uncover training or growth opportunities for your rep, or simply determine that you are spending too much or too little time talking to customers. We track escalations in our CRM through a simple input field that includes the name of the person that will handle the escalation (this auto-generates an email to said person), a link to the account in question, and a brief summary of the reason for escalation. The manager will then fill out an additional note and either close the escalation, or provide next steps. 

Escalations are a necessary part of any client relationship management job, but they can be used to gather additional information on how your current process is working, and highlight training and growth opportunities for your team. Not to mention the huge impact that they can have on your retention and expansion rates.