Every business needs a system in place to ensure that issues are fixed immediately upon customer contact. If customers have problems that aren’t solved after the first attempt to contact support, they may give that team a low rating. The repercussions of doing so may be devastating. Statistics show that when customers are dissatisfied with a company’s customer service, 89% of them will begin making purchases from a competitor. When it comes to helping customers, the best software can make a big difference.
Let’s face it: for the vast majority of companies, a 100% first-contact resolution rate is simply not feasible. There will always be cases where your service representatives, no matter how knowledgeable or well-trained they are, are unable to solve a customer’s problem. Occasionally, service agents will run into problems that are beyond their expertise, and in those cases, they’ll have to involve the technical staff. At this point, it’s crucial to have a system in place for escalating tickets.
Your ticket volume will increase as your business expands. Therefore, the sooner you can streamline your ticket escalation process, the better. Now the question is, what is escalation, and how could it improve the service quality? To answer this question, in this article, we have discussed what is escalation and what are escalation levels in help desk software? We have also overviewed their importance and benefits. We hope it will be really helpful for you to improve your service level. Before going to the escalation levels first, we should overview what escalation is. So, let’s move forward with our main topic.
Ticket escalation is a common term for escalation in help desk software. Each customer service department has multiple levels of specialists who can respond to different inquiries. In a perfect world, the issue can be solved by the first person to speak with the customer. All anyone could ask for is that your customer and agent are satisfied. Unfortunately, it isn’t the case for the majority of organizations and service teams. The process of communicating a requester’s issue or request to a senior customer service representative is known as “ticket escalation.” You might be wondering why escalating a ticket is necessary. They are manageable during the initial contact. The majority of support tickets can be resolved with just one contact. However, senior agents who have more authority, technical expertise, or simply superior authority than the lower-tier agents may need to intervene with certain tickets when they are not solved on the first contact. This intervention is called escalation.
The handling of ticket escalation is done through a tiered support system. Depending on the seriousness of the issue, each team member handles a variety of customer issues. The most popular method for beginning a hierarchical escalation system is self-service. Agents are then given the problem based on their knowledge and access to various resources and information. An organization’s size can impact the escalation process. While a smaller company might only have one or two agents, a larger company might have several tiers and agents.
SLA violation is another important thing to discuss in this regard. SLA means service level agreement. This agreement takes place between the service agent and requester about the timeline of the ticket. When a ticket is not resolved in that specific time, it is called an SLA-violated ticket. That SLA-violated ticket automatically escalated according to the predefined rules of an organization.
Previously, we established that ticket escalation is a tiered support system that establishes to whom a ticket must be forwarded if it is not resolved on the first contact or within a certain time frame. When service level agreements (SLAs) are broken or the requester contacts twice in a short period of time, tickets are automatically escalated based on a set of rules and hierarchies that have been predefined for this purpose. The issue could be taken to a higher level of management if it could not be resolved at this stage. Help desk software features escalation levels, which are the predefined rules we’ve been discussing. Help desk software typically allows for these tiers to be added to, removed from, or modified by the company as needed.
If your first-line workers are unable to resolve a customer’s issue, they can escalate it to a higher-level team. Inevitably, this will result in longer wait times for customers and more stress for already-busy service staff. Escalating tickets is generally frowned upon but essential for efficient service delivery.
We are well aware that the bar for customer satisfaction has been raised significantly. About one-quarter of customers (27%) want an immediate email reply from a company. However, the majority (62%) of customers expect a reply within 24 hours. Therefore, efficient ticket management requires swift escalation that yields a more satisfactory resolution and continuous communication with the customer. An expedited method of escalating support tickets can help you gain the loyalty of your customers. That’s why effective escalation management is so important for organizations in their daily routine service operations.
The vast importance of the escalation process clearly reflects that it must have some benefits, due to which organizations always try to manage it effectively. Following are some benefits of escalation and escalation levels in help desk software.
Standard change processes and predictive or standard requests by customers do not so much need escalation. It is because these requests are solved on the first contact. The real problem arises when some incident occurs. Then, effective escalation management is badly needed to tackle that incident because incidents cannot be managed in a short time period or on the first time contact. That’s why it causes an effective incident management policy.
Due to the automatic escalation of tickets, the average time spent on one ticket may reduce. It is because if the ticket is forwarded manually, then it might be a little bit late. But in case of automatic escalation, there is no chance of being late. So in this way, it reduces the time consumption on ticket resolution.
The satisfaction level of both employees and customers improves due to predefined escalation levels in help desk software. It is because customers need quick implementation of their requests, and they do not want to contact the service team again and again. Therefore, through escalation, tickets could be solved in less time. In this way, customer satisfaction levels increased. On the other hand, service agents do not have enough time to forward every ticket. In this regard, ticket escalation causes a hike in the satisfaction level of the service team.
Due to the improved satisfaction level of the service team, their performance got better than it was before. But despite the satisfaction level, there is another factor due to which the service team’s performance improved a lot. We said this because escalation is like a hanging sword on the heads of service agents. They knew that tickets would be automatically forwarded to their seniors if they did not solve it in a specific time frame. In this way, their performance automatically improves when they work fastly to solve the ticket within the provided time frame.
Through effective ticket management, service quality could be improved, and effective ticket management always demands effective escalation management. Escalation process provides a complete way to where a ticket should be forwarded if it is not solved within a definite time period. In this way, it reduces time consumption and provides more satisfaction to customers and employees. These factors improve the service quality of an organization.
Despite benefits, there are also many disadvantages and harms that an organization has to face due to its absence within an organizational structure. For example, customer satisfaction level goes down due to the absence of a provided mechanism for forwarding tickets. Moreover, there is no check and balance system for the service agent if his performance is not measured through automatic escalation. Through all these factors, service level goes down, due to which the productivity of an organization decreases. That’s why we stated that there are several disadvantages due to the absence of effective escalation management.
Through all the above discussion, we learned that escalation in help desk software refers to the automatic forwarding of tickets if they were not solved within the provided time frame. Escalation levels in help desk software are the predefined rules about when & where a ticket would be escalated if it is not solved in the provided time frame. Effective escalation process is vital for an organization because its presence within the organizational structure has many benefits. However, despite benefits, there are also many harms and disadvantages for an organization if they do not manage it effectively. That’s why an organization must keep it in mind if it wants to be more successful than its rivals. Effective escalation management could take your organization to the next level of success and glory.
