You are in the escalation chart, what does it really means?

I, as part of a management team and lead of a Line of Service, am in the service delivery management escalation.

In the ITIL books you can read a lot of pages about what does means, your responsibilities, expectations around the role, typical actions….

But, does the books talks about how your customer see this fact?

Your customer knows what this process means, he bought it, and he wants to be sure that he is receiving what he is paying.

So, he is going to ask you about major incidents, RCAs, improvement actions and a good list of questions to see if that fantastic escalation process works.

So, for the formal escalation, we have reports, meetings and things like that.

But I also like the informative escalation specially before meet a customer. In a nutshell:

“hi Peter, I’m going to visit John, how is everything going on?”

If you are asked by a customer about what’s going on with a problem and you do not know anything about it, his reaction will be in the second or third time: he is not aware about what’s going on. He is going to have a negative image of what you do.

But, if you are aware and you  are able to inform about it with some details, his reaction will be different. He is aware you are not going to resolve any problem, he knows you can support your team, and he knows that at the end of the day there are SLAs that cover the agreement between both sides and that it does not matter if you are aware or not of this issue, but at the relationship level, his reaction and attitude about you and your proffessionality is going to be positive.