Introduction
When something goes wrong in your organisation or business, do people know what action to take (i.e. the escalation process)? Is the issue raised to the right people at the right time or do they only find out once what was a small flame has become a forest fire? How often have you or someone in your business been made aware of a problem from an external party rather than your own team?
It’s a fact of life that things go wrong within every business. Whether it’s a customer complaint, a regulatory issue, a missed target, or a full-blown system failure, these things happen. Taking prompt, agreed action is key in ensuring it doesn’t create more problems than it has already. Having an effective escalation procedure in place can help to ensure this happens.
What Is An Escalation Process?
An escalation process defines the steps that need to be followed when something goes wrong. Having these in place helps to mitigate some of the risk by having a plan of action for when an issue occurs.
The detail in the plan is important as a procedure that simply has a step stating “Check for issues and escalate accordingly” (and I have seen them written like that) is next to no use in taking meaningful action.
Not having an effective escalation process can be costly. In 2022, the Financial Conduct Authority fined a UK bank almost £30 million with ineffective escalation processes being cited as one of the failings. Read the detailed report here.
Escalation Process Example
Let’s take a system outage as an example of something that might trigger an incident and require escalation management.
In the first instance, the escalation might be simply to notify a defined person or group in IT of the outage. Their response (or even lack of) could trigger further escalation.
For example, a confirmed outage of less than thirty minutes might only require the attention of a supervisor or manager, whereas an outage lasting more than a day could require the involvement of a senior manager or even the CEO (depending on the size of the business). Having a clear understanding of what level of severity warrants which action can help ensure that issues are addressed promptly and effectively.
Key Elements of An Escalation Management Process
A good escalation process should specify exactly who is informed, when they’re informed, and how often they are updated until the issue is resolved. It can also detail expected response times from departments and whether external parties such as clients or regulators need to be told and when. It allows businesses to communicate proactively rather than being on the back foot.
Ultimately, there should be no room for doubt over what needs to happen and who is responsible for doing it.
Escalation Processes Have Additional Benefits
Having these escalation processes in place isn’t only beneficial for the business in terms of their response. It also benefits employees by providing them with a sense of security and confidence in their ability to handle unexpected situations.
Once you have them documented, then opportunities for automatic escalation might become apparent, ensuring issues are identified as they happened and further reducing the time it takes for them to be raised and resolved.