escalation-management
Handles customer situations that have exceeded normal support — severity assessment, incident communication, executive escalation, and recovering a relationship after a failure. Use this when a customer issue is escalating or has gone to leadership, during a customer-affecting outage, when a major account is at risk, when a relationship needs repairing after a failure, or to design the escalation path itself.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount /tmp/escalation-management && cp -r /tmp/escalation-management/plugins/customer-experience/skills/escalation-management ~/.claude/skills/escalation-managementSKILL.md
# Escalation management An escalation is a signal that the normal path failed. Handling it well matters; the more useful question afterward is why it was needed. ## Assess severity from the customer's position Severity is what it costs *them*, not how alarming it looks internally. A cosmetic bug blocking a regulated filing is severe. A total outage of a feature nobody uses is not. Ask: what can they not do, how many people, is there a workaround, and is there a deadline attached. That last one converts a medium into a critical more often than anything technical. ## Running one **Own it visibly.** One named person, introduced to the customer, who does not disappear. Escalations get worse when ownership is ambiguous — the customer starts re-explaining, which is its own insult. **Communicate on a stated cadence**, and hold it even when there is nothing new. "No update yet, next update at three" preserves trust; silence destroys it faster than bad news does. Customers escalate again because they heard nothing, far more often than because of the underlying issue. **Separate acknowledgment from explanation.** Acknowledge the impact immediately, in their terms. Explanation comes when you actually know. Leading with a cause you have not confirmed means retracting it later, and the retraction is what they remember. **Do not over-promise to end the conversation.** Every commitment made under pressure to a frustrated customer is a commitment someone has to keep, and failing a recovery promise ends the relationship. ## Executive escalation When a customer reaches your leadership, the relationship is already damaged — the escalation is the symptom. Brief the executive properly before the call: what happened, what we have done, what we are committing to, and what not to promise. An executive walking in uninformed makes commitments the delivering team learns about afterward. ## Recovery Recovery is not an apology. It is: acknowledge specifically what failed, say what changed so it cannot recur, and demonstrate it over time. Credits and discounts are compensation, not recovery — they close the ledger without addressing the trust. The strongest recovery move is showing them the fix shipped. ## Afterward Every escalation gets a short review: what made the normal path fail, was severity assessed correctly, did we communicate on time, and what would have prevented it. Escalation volume is a health metric for the whole function. Rising escalations mean the normal path is failing more often, and that is the thing to fix. ## Never - Escalate without naming an owner. An escalation with no name on it is a broadcast. - Commit to a fix date on the customer's call before engineering has said one exists. - Let the executive sponsor become the case owner. Sponsors unblock; they do not run the case. - Close on the technical fix. It closes when the customer says it is closed.
Corporate Strategy (CSO). Owns plugins/corporate-strategy/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Customer Experience (CCO). Owns plugins/customer-experience/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Data & Analytics (CDO). Owns plugins/data-analytics/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Demand Generation (CMO). Owns plugins/demand-generation/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Office of the CEO. Owns plugins/executive/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Finance (CFO). Owns plugins/finance/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Corporate IT. Owns plugins/it-operations/** and nothing else. Delegate service desk, systems and network administration, virtualization and cloud, telephony and conferencing, endpoints, assets, identity lifecycle, and backup work here.
Reviewer-class. Read-only review of what other departments commit to — contract terms, privacy and data handling, risk acceptance, and compliance findings. Holds no write surface. Its findings are not overrulable by the department under review.