Pushing Through with Your Escalation List (VoIP Deployment)

An escalation list is a section of a company organization chart. The main difference being that the company level organization chart identifies every employee in every department, and the branching hierarchy of its managers, directors, and vice presidents, all the way up to the CEO or president. An escalation list is only a slice of that organization chart, focusing on a specific section of the company. The list represents a single chain of responsibility for a function, whether troubleshooting or provisioning, and the list ignores all the other employees in unrelated jobs within the company.
As a customer who uses VoIP service, your carrier should provide you with an escalation list that covers
Provisioning issues: You use this part of the escalation list for any pending order (adds, moves, or changes) that haven’t been officially completed or accepted. The staff on this part of the escalation list work normal business hours because you can’t really have a legitimate after-hours provisioning issue situation. If, through some freak occurrence, your service does become discontinued at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, you’re S.O.L (Simply Out of Luck) until Monday morning.
Trouble reporting issues: This section of the escalation list never sleeps. The list may have phone numbers on it for both normal business hours and after-hours staff, or you may simply be given cell phone and pager numbers for after-hours situations.
The standard escalation list begins at the lowest level of escalation, that generally identifies the standard phone number for the customer service or provisioning queue, and progresses to the highest level that’s usually the vice president over the department. You can see a simple escalation in Table 18-1.

You can use an escalation list to raise the visibility of an issue in an attempt to accelerate resolution. You aren’t encountering more intelligent, seasoned, and ingenious technicians while you move up the chain of command. The individuals at the director and vice-president levels probably didn’t get those jobs because of their superior VoIP troubleshooting skills, but because of their superior management skills. They may know how to spell VoIP, but they probably don’t know how to read a Wireshark capture. The reality of escalating any issue is that the first- or second-level technician on your escalation list does the real work of resolving a problem. The managers and vice presidents of the company can more easily help by bringing in additional technicians or authorizing overtime. In the end, the problem will be resolved by a technician who sits at level 1 or 2 of your escalation list working through the issue.
Escalation lists are like antibiotics. If you use them all the time, your issues become immune to the treatment. A more real-world explanation is that the staff on the escalation list begin to see you as an alarmist, so they treat all your escalations like fire drills and, even though you’re trying to escalate something, they don’t handle it with any more urgency than if you didn’t call everyone and their VP.
To prevent rampant abuse of escalation lists, ask yourself the following questions to qualify the situation:
✓ Do I really have to escalate this issue? The individuals you’re employing to move the problem along faster are going to be asking the same question. If you sent in a request to migrate a phone number from your old carrier this morning and you’re pushing to have it installed by close of business tonight, rethink using the escalation list. You should let any task that routinely has a timeline of more than 24 hours run its course before escalating.
* Have I waited long enough before escalating to the next level? Some carriers, especially local phone carriers, have specific time limits that you must meet before they allow an additional escalation. The specific timelines they hold before an issue can be escalated to the next level allows the existing escalation level to make progress and respond to you before you ratchet the situation up another notch. Calling a second-level escalation person, leaving a message, and then immediately calling the third-level escalation person simply causes a duplication of efforts. Unless you tell the second-level escalation person that you’re going to call the next person up the list in five minutes, both individuals start working on the issue. Eventually, they’re both standing next to the technician who’s actually working on the issue and realize that one of them is wasting their time.
Are you escalating out of anger or frustration? You may happen to get a technician on an off day, and he or she seems wholly apathetic. In this case, ignore the technician’s behavior and just ask to speak to his or her manager. He or she is probably glad to get you off the line. The goal of escalating is to move the issue to people who can assist you and resolve the problem sooner than if you let it follow the normal drift. Escalating past the technicians who are working on the problem only raises the visibility of the issue within your carrier. The vice president may now be aware of it, but he or she isn’t going to run to the tech department, edge out the technician, and start pulling packet captures. Escalate issues beyond the technicians only when you believe it can help prevent similar situations in the future. A vice president isn’t going to personally fix your problem, but by bringing it to his or her attention, you may encourage him or her to build infrastructure in the company to keep it from happening again.
Your escalation list is an effective means of resolving problems if you use it correctly, but it’s a sure way to destroy your relationship with your carrier if you use it improperly. Escalations don’t have to be contentious. The more you enroll your carrier to help you, in a firm but engaging manner, the faster things progress toward resolution.