Advanced Escalations

The Advanced Escalations Feature Add-on makes your escalation management more flexible and adjusts it according to your customers or to different Service Level Agreements. Escalation types defined in OTRS, such as “First Response Time,“ “Update Time,“ and “Solution Time,“ can be enhanced by creating new types and defining your own names and properties.

The “Ticket Escalation Types” option in the Admin section of OTRS enables you to define when escalations should:

• start,
• stop,
• be suspended,
• be resumed
• and be restarted.

Ticket attributes, like its status or certain events like creating or answering a ticket, can be used as a trigger. For example, an escalation can start when a ticket is created, is stopped, or when the ticket is answered by the agent. If the status of a ticket is changed to “Pending Reminder,” the escalation is suspended, but if the status is changed back to “Open,” the escalation resumes. An up-to-date display of the escalation time left makes accurate service time management possible.

In the ticket view, the new widget “Escalation Information” appears. This shows through the use of different colors and numerical values whether or not:

• the escalation time is still within the original timeframe (green),
• the escalation time will run out soon (yellow),
• the escalation is paused (brown),
• the escalation time has been reached, i.e. the ticket has escalated (red) or
• escalation has been suspended or the ticket has been worked on during escalation (the window is no longer visible).

The “Ticket Escalation Type Bundle” option enables you to assign newly created escalation types to different clients or Service Level Agreements.

The following scenarios can now be handled more flexibly with “Advanced Escalations”:

• A customer requests a rework of a solution – the escalation must be adjusted.
• To present a solution, more information is required from the customer – the escalation must be suspended.
• A service technician can’t get into the building or has no free access to the machine that needs to be fixed – the escalation must be suspended
• and many more!