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.
Concentrates marketing and sales effort on a named set of accounts rather than on volume — qualifying whether the model fits your economics at all, building the account list and the buying group inside each, tiering effort against account value, coordinating so the account experiences one campaign rather than several, and measuring account progression instead of leads. Use this to decide whether to run an account-based program, build one, or work out why an existing one produces activity and no pipeline.
Designs orchestrator-and-subagent hierarchies for a repository — splitting agents by exclusive write surface, pairing every producer with an independent auditor, and enforcing the split with a script that runs in CI. Use this whenever the user wants to set up, expand, audit, or fix a multi-agent or subagent structure for a codebase; asks how to divide work between agents; wants agent charters, roles, or a surface map written; or is hitting agents that collide on the same files, review their own work, or drift from their remit. Also use when sizing a roster or deciding whether a new agent is justified.
Governs models and AI systems in production — intended use, evaluation, monitoring, human oversight, documentation, and the decision to deploy or retire. Use this before deploying a model or AI feature, when defining evaluation criteria, when a model's behavior has drifted, when assessing AI risk or regulatory exposure, or when deciding whether an AI system is fit for a consequential decision.
Produces executive-level research — market sizing, competitor mapping, trend analysis, and strategic intelligence — grounded in cited sources with the confidence in each claim made explicit. Use this to analyze a market or industry, map competitors, evaluate a market-entry or build-versus-buy decision, produce a research brief, or assemble evidence for a decision. Also use when comparing options that need a structured, evidence-based verdict rather than an opinion.
Optimizes for AI assistants and AI-generated answers — being retrievable, being cited, and being represented accurately when a model answers on your behalf. Use this when traffic is shifting from links to AI answers, when a brand is misrepresented or absent in AI responses, when planning content for retrieval rather than ranking, or when deciding how AI search changes an existing SEO program.
Improves visibility and conversion in the App Store and Google Play — metadata, keywords, screenshots, ratings, and the listing experience that turns an impression into an install. Use this to audit or optimize an app listing, plan a launch listing, diagnose poor install conversion, or improve store search visibility.
Protects and restores data — backup coverage and scope, retention, immutability against ransomware, and proving restores actually work. Use this to design a backup regime, verify restores, plan retention, protect backups from ransomware, or recover from data loss.
Runs the planning cycle — annual budget, rolling forecast, consolidation of business unit inputs, and the variance analysis that explains actuals against plan. Use this to build or challenge a budget, run a forecast cycle, consolidate departmental submissions, explain why results diverged from plan, or improve forecast accuracy.