Five and under

An escalation is a promise that something will move faster. Most escalation processes break that promise, and they break it structurally rather than through negligence.

Two rules. No more than five steps from the customer to the person who can decide. And every step has a named owner and a stated exit condition: what has to be true for this to move on, and by when.

The five is not arbitrary. Each step adds a handover, a restatement of context and a wait, and beyond about five the escalation takes longer than the original problem would have taken to solve badly. Customers experience long escalation chains as being passed around, which is exactly what is happening.

The exit condition matters more than the owner. A step with an owner and no exit condition is a queue with a name on it: the owner has no definition of when their part is done, so it is done when they get to it.

Write the path down and then test it with a real case, timing each step. The result is usually two or three times the stated service level, and the gap is nearly always in one step where the exit condition was never defined.