🔥 The Power of Escalating Tickets

[#1]

Problem

---

The self-service approach is what we value and try to implement with our apps. Allowing customers to escalate Jira tickets helps us to deliver top-notch customer support and to speed up critical ticket resolution. By embracing this self-service approach and leveraging the power of escalation, we have witnessed improved transparency, efficient workflow, and, ultimately, greater customer satisfaction. This particular implementation has revolutionized our support system, allowing us to swiftly identify and prioritize urgent cases, ensuring that they receive immediate attention from our dedicated support agents.

Keep reading because we will explore how this feature has become an integral part of our internal process. 👀

Our solution

---

The flow in 5 steps – How Jira ticket escalation process should work 

1. John is our app user, and the system has crashed. He created a new ticket to report the bug. 
2. Upon creating the request, John notices a prominent banner providing information on escalating an issue to underline its importance. Recognizing the urgency of his current ticket, John clicks on the Escalate button, effectively indicating that this particular request requires immediate action. 
3. By clicking the Escalate button, John successfully changed the ticket's priority from medium to critical, and its status is now officially "escalated." This modification is crucial as it helps prioritize the ticket and ensures it receives immediate attention from the support team.
4. From the agent's perspective, we see Escalated status on the issue, and they know to prioritize it. Moreover, we have a unique escalated queue where all urgent issues are stored. 
5. A customer sees on the portal additional information about Assignee (it's clear who the agent is), resolution date, attachments, and priority set by an agent.
   
   

Customer perspective - request details view

Agent perspective - issue view

 

Why is it worth it? –  Benefits of Jira escalate button

• Improved Urgency Management: The Escalate button provides a simple yet effective way for users like John to communicate the urgency of a particular issue. This feature enables support teams to quickly identify and address critical cases, avoiding any unnecessary delays in resolution.
  
  
• Enhanced Transparency: With the workflow and status updates clearly visible to users, there is increased transparency in issue tracking and resolution. John can stay informed about the progress of his escalated ticket, giving him peace of mind that the matter is being handled appropriately.
  
  
• Efficient Agent Workflow: When a ticket is escalated, support agents can immediately identify it in a special Escalated queue. This segregation ensures that urgent cases receive prompt attention, preventing them from being buried among regular requests.
  
  
• Improved Collaboration: The Escalate button not only changes the ticket status but also adds a comment under the issue, detailing who made the escalation and when it occurred. This additional information fosters collaboration between users and support teams, as everyone is aware of the actions taken on the ticket.
  
  

 

Solution and tools you need

Native functionalities in Jira Service Management: 

• customer portal
• queues
• request forms with configured workflows

App:

Feature Bundle for Jira Service Management: 

• allowing customer to edit request on the portal
• collecting data on the portal
• displaying customizable announcements on the portal

Watch a detailed step-by-step configuration video 🎥

[Andy Gladstone]

@Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ I'm curious whether the app provides admins and support agents the ability to mark an escalated ticket as non-critical or some other designation. One of the roadblocks for many support management teams to providing transparent and easy escalation paths is the fear of abuse by users to set all tickets as P1 or Critical when they are really not. I'd love to have a way of easily identifying and tracking abuse by users or domains to help monitor workflows for efficiency.

[Dave Mathijs]

@Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ 

I agree with the first point of the banner instructions: Always call the Service Desk for critical issues.

However, in my opinion, it is the agent who classifies/prioritizes the incident and sets the classified priority after the initial priority (urgency x impact) set by the customer upon submission of the ticket.

A customer escalating an issue should not increase the priority by default, but an agent should be notified upon escalation. A separate Escalated (to do) status triggers the team/agent to re-classify.

@Andy Gladstone 

You could track the number of escalations in combination with a priority increase to see how many were acknowledged/validated.