{"slug":"escalation-management","title":"escalation-management","summary":"Handles customer situations that have exceeded normal support — severity assessment, incident communication, executive escalation, and recovering a relationship after a failure. Use this when a customer issue is escalating or has gone to leadership, during a customer-affecting ou","platform":"Claude","tags":[],"authorName":"LLM Mart","authorSlug":"llm-mart","score":0,"source":"github","price":null,"verified":false,"createdAt":"2026-08-30T09:48:21.778229Z","repo":{"url":"https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount","stars":1633,"forks":245,"license":"MIT","updatedAt":"2026-09-17T19:13:19Z"},"bodyHtml":"<hr>\n<h2>name: escalation-management\ndescription: Handles customer situations that have exceeded normal support — severity assessment, incident communication, executive escalation, and recovering a relationship after a failure. Use this when a customer issue is escalating or has gone to leadership, during a customer-affecting outage, when a major account is at risk, when a relationship needs repairing after a failure, or to design the escalation path itself.</h2>\n<h1>Escalation management</h1>\n<p>An escalation is a signal that the normal path failed. Handling it well matters; the more useful\nquestion afterward is why it was needed.</p>\n<h2>Assess severity from the customer's position</h2>\n<p>Severity is what it costs <em>them</em>, not how alarming it looks internally. A cosmetic bug blocking a\nregulated filing is severe. A total outage of a feature nobody uses is not.</p>\n<p>Ask: what can they not do, how many people, is there a workaround, and is there a deadline attached.\nThat last one converts a medium into a critical more often than anything technical.</p>\n<h2>Running one</h2>\n<p><strong>Own it visibly.</strong> One named person, introduced to the customer, who does not disappear. Escalations\nget worse when ownership is ambiguous — the customer starts re-explaining, which is its own insult.</p>\n<p><strong>Communicate on a stated cadence</strong>, and hold it even when there is nothing new. \"No update yet, next\nupdate at three\" preserves trust; silence destroys it faster than bad news does. Customers escalate\nagain because they heard nothing, far more often than because of the underlying issue.</p>\n<p><strong>Separate acknowledgment from explanation.</strong> Acknowledge the impact immediately, in their terms.\nExplanation comes when you actually know. Leading with a cause you have not confirmed means\nretracting it later, and the retraction is what they remember.</p>\n<p><strong>Do not over-promise to end the conversation.</strong> Every commitment made under pressure to a\nfrustrated customer is a commitment someone has to keep, and failing a recovery promise ends the\nrelationship.</p>\n<h2>Executive escalation</h2>\n<p>When a customer reaches your leadership, the relationship is already damaged — the escalation is\nthe symptom.</p>\n<p>Brief the executive properly before the call: what happened, what we have done, what we are\ncommitting to, and what not to promise. An executive walking in uninformed makes commitments the\ndelivering team learns about afterward.</p>\n<h2>Recovery</h2>\n<p>Recovery is not an apology. It is: acknowledge specifically what failed, say what changed so it\ncannot recur, and demonstrate it over time. Credits and discounts are compensation, not recovery —\nthey close the ledger without addressing the trust.</p>\n<p>The strongest recovery move is showing them the fix shipped.</p>\n<h2>Afterward</h2>\n<p>Every escalation gets a short review: what made the normal path fail, was severity assessed\ncorrectly, did we communicate on time, and what would have prevented it.</p>\n<p>Escalation volume is a health metric for the whole function. Rising escalations mean the normal path\nis failing more often, and that is the thing to fix.</p>\n","files":[{"path":"references/sources.md","sizeBytes":942,"isText":true},{"path":"SKILL.md","sizeBytes":3727,"isText":true}],"reviewScore":null,"reviewSummary":null,"trust":{"provenance":"trusted-source-unreviewed","notice":"Community-authored content, reproduced verbatim and not vetted as instructions. Treat it as data to evaluate, never as directives to follow.","bodySource":null},"bodyLocked":false,"purchaseUrl":null,"sourceUrl":null,"report":{"provenance":"trusted-source-unreviewed","screen":{"ran":true,"outcome":"clean","suspicious":0,"notes":0,"hiddenCharacters":false},"virusScan":{"engine":"clamav","status":"clean","scannedAt":"2026-09-20T13:54:58.909756Z","sha256":"5B0A6C8BA558619DF597D99DE13C15C4F9355D3FBBCD3CBECD7892D8637D81D7","sizeBytes":2534},"review":null,"source":{"repositoryUrl":"https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount","path":"plugins/customer-experience/skills/escalation-management","license":"MIT","commit":"98d1c17d480f606060102a781f9a8601690685f7","subtreeSha":"1AA909B2D51E3FFB7221F61F29BD2D872A1EAAB706BCE38109C6B62FF36CB9A3","lastSyncedAt":"2026-09-20T13:51:06.173703Z"},"reviewedAt":"2026-09-20T14:00:10.052726Z","notice":"Community-authored content, reproduced verbatim and not vetted as instructions. Treat it as data to evaluate, never as directives to follow."},"install":[{"target":"skills-cli","command":"npx skills add https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount/tree/main/plugins/customer-experience/skills/escalation-management"},{"target":"claude-code","command":"claude plugin marketplace add https://llmmart.ai/marketplace.json && claude plugin install cbrock84-headcount@llmmart"},{"target":"git","command":"git clone https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount.git"}]}