An escalation policy moves a late ticket up, level by level: after a delay, the ticket is reassigned to another group, the group is notified, or the on-call person is paged. The Escalation tab of Service Desk settings is restricted to Administrators and Service Desk administrators.
Choose the tickets concerned
New policy asks for:
- Name and Order;
- Active: clear the box to suspend the policy without deleting it; an inactive policy is no longer applied, and levels already reached stay in the ticket history;
- Priority and Category: a specific value or "Any". The category must match exactly: a policy set on a category does not cover its subcategories;
- Applies:
- "Until an agent is assigned": escalation stops as soon as an agent takes the ticket;
- "Until the ticket is resolved": escalation goes on until resolution, for example to move from level 1 to level 2, then level 3.
A ticket follows the first active policy that matches it, in ascending order of the Order column. So place the most specific policies (a priority and a category) before the general ones.
Levels
Under Levels, Add a level adds a row:
- Delay (minutes): time elapsed since the ticket was created, counted in business hours of the calendar of the ticket's SLA policy; if the ticket has no SLA policy, or that policy has no calendar, the delay is counted in real elapsed time, nights and weekends included;
- Reassign to group: the ticket is handed to this group and the individual agent is removed; "No reassignment" leaves the assignment as is;
- Notify: notifies the members of the chosen group (or, without reassignment, those of the assigned group, or the assigned agent);
- On call: pages the group's on-call person and assigns the ticket to them; without acknowledgement within the time set in the schedule, the backup is paged (see "Organize on-call duty").
Each level must have at least one effect: reassign, notify or page on-call. Levels are sorted by delay when saved. The bin on a row removes a level; Delete, at the bottom of the policy, deletes it entirely.
Good to know
- Policies are applied every five minutes, to tickets that are neither resolved nor closed.
- Each level applies only once per ticket, and escalation never goes backwards: if you add a level shorter than one already reached, it is skipped.
- Each applied level is recorded in the ticket history.
See also
- "Define SLAs and OLAs": the calendars and times the calculation relies on.
- "Organize on-call duty": schedules and on-call people.