Escalation Rate

What is the Escalation Rate?

The Escalation Rate measures the percentage of customer support tickets that have risen, or “escalated,” to the following level of support. For example, a customer has called in about a problem with your product. The customer’s issue wasn’t resolved at the first support tier, so the customer’s ticket is then passed on, or escalates, to the second support tier.

A ticket can be passed along either a vertical or horizontal axis. On the vertical axis, the ticket passes up to a more senior colleague. On the horizontal axis, the ticket situation prompts involvement from more colleagues at the support team’s level. Either way, the ticket has escalated–the customer situation has revealed itself to require a larger and more complex solution that a single support team member can’t provide.

Escalation Rate is an important KPI for your support team to track.

Why do support teams need to measure their Escalation Rate?

The Escalation Rate indicates potential pain points with your customers’ product use, as well as within your own support team’s response protocol. With this in mind, tracking your Escalation Rate means you can identify areas for improvement within your product development and your support team. Doing this will allow you to also reduce operational costs – and stress – as escalations can be expensive, time-consuming, and all-around headaches to handle.

How to calculate Escalation Rate

Escalation Rate is calculated on the basis of period–quarter, month, day, etc.

How to decrease your support team’s Escalation Rate

Because of the expenses associated with the Escalation Rate, it’s best to reduce it, ideally below 10 percent of total ticket responses. Define exactly what counts as an Escalation Rate in your organization, and then set the appropriate benchmarks to reduce it over time.

A critical component of this reduction process is sufficiently training your support team–giving them the know-how to handle more sophisticated or complex customer cases without passing them off to others.

Evaluate your Escalation Rate in the context of your customer demographics, and alongside other KPIs that measure customer satisfaction. Be sure, however, that a worthy focus on improving metrics doesn’t obscure or detract from the holistic quality of your customer support.

Other KPIs similar to Escalation Rate include:

• First Response Time
• Call Abandonment Rate
• Average Reply Time