Best practices for managing escalations
In customer service, escalations are critical to solving issues efficiently, especially when complex problems require a higher level of support. With the flexibility of Jira Service Management (JSM), you can build a custom process for handling escalations that works best for your team. Here’s a breakdown of best practices to effectively manage escalations in JSM.
1. Setting Up a Dedicated Escalation Queue
A queue specifically for escalations helps your team easily track and manage issues that need immediate attention. Here’s how to set one up:
- Create an Escalation Identifier: Add an Escalations custom field or label for agents to tag urgent issues. Alternatively, you can create a component to mark escalated tickets.
- Build the Queue: Configure a new queue using this custom field or tag to filter escalated issues. This queue ensures your team has a quick, centralized view of all escalated items.
- Implement SLAs for Escalations: You can set a specific Service Level Agreement (SLA) for escalation response times, ensuring your team acts quickly on high-priority issues. Adding an automated rule can notify the right agents when a new issue is tagged as escalated.
2. Adding an Escalation Status to Your Workflow
Integrating an escalation status into your workflow keeps track of an issue’s current escalation stage. Here’s how to set it up:
- Define Escalation Stages: Add statuses like Escalated, Escalated to Tier 2, or Escalated to Tech Support to your workflow. This structure allows agents to categorize issues based on escalation level.
- Organize by Queue: Each escalation status can have a corresponding queue, giving agents quick access to issues by priority level. This approach is particularly helpful when several teams handle different stages of escalation.
3. Using Mentions to Bring in the Right People
In situations where an issue needs insight from another team member, mentions are an effective way to bring them into the conversation:
- @Mentions for Tiered Support: Agents can @mention a more experienced agent or a specialist on an issue, notifying them via email to weigh in or take over. Mentions can be internal (private) or public, depending on whether customers should see the comment.
- Reassigning Issues Directly: Alternatively, agents can reassign escalated issues directly to higher-tier agents, ensuring the right person is responsible for the next steps.
4. Escalating Issues Between Jira Service Management and Other Jira Products
When you use Jira Service Management alongside other Jira tools, escalations can easily flow between support and development teams, which is especially valuable for technical issues.
- Linked Issues: JSM agents can create a linked issue in Jira Software to involve developers in troubleshooting and provide updates to customers when their issues are under investigation. Linked issues give both support and development teams visibility into which bugs are prioritized and being worked on.
- Collaborative Mentions: When both JSM and Jira are on the same site, JSM agents can @mention Jira Software users on escalated issues. This allows developers to add internal comments on the JSM ticket without directly handling the issue.
Conclusion
Managing escalations effectively within Jira Service Management is all about tailoring the setup to your team’s workflow. By creating dedicated queues, defining clear escalation statuses, leveraging mentions, and linking issues across teams, you can streamline escalations and ensure a smoother customer experience. These practices empower your team to respond quickly and efficiently, helping to maintain customer satisfaction even in complex support scenarios.
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