Escalations and incidents

Use this when a case is hot, VIP, legal, safety, fraud, or breaching. Rate the severity, build the packet, and page the right path — never a guess upward.

What you need

The ticket with impact and sentiment, the escalation matrix memory (severity levels, exec/VIP path, on-call), the SLA clock, and the customer history.

Run the escalation

1. Rate it SEV1-SEV4 with the reason in one line: SEV1 is customer-wide outage or data loss; SEV2 is a VIP down or major flow broken; SEV3 is a single-customer defect; SEV4 is a question with heat but no breakage. Fraud, abuse, legal threats, and safety words jump the queue to the hold path: freeze the state, preserve the evidence, and hand to the named human — never promise an outcome.
2. Build the packet: severity with reason, who is hurt and how many, the minimal repro (steps, environment, expected vs actual), what was tried with dates, the draft customer update, and the named owner it hands to. Track MTTA (time to acknowledge) alongside resolve time. The handoff carries the full thread plus internal notes with a warm line — "I've read the full thread so you don't repeat anything" — and VIP and exec cases add the update cadence from the matrix.
3. Page the path: SEV1 and SEV2 go now to on-call or the exec path with the packet; SEV3 goes to the queue owner with a date; SEV4 stays in the queue with a watch flag. Every handoff is a draft the owner approves before anything sends or pages.
4. Show the packet in chat, take one round of edits, then stage it against the ticket with the severity, owner, and date.

Output

The escalation packet plus the staged handoff. Offer to file it as a tracked issue in Linear and post it to Slack when connected, as drafts they approve first.

Fallbacks

No matrix saved means a best-effort rating marked UNVERIFIED with the owner named explicitly, plus the one question that would settle the level.