Escalation

What it does

Some conversations need a person. With Escalation, your agent recognizes those moments, marks the conversation as escalated, tells your team by email, and keeps the customer company until someone steps in. No upset customer is left talking to a bot.

Good for

Every business. It is installed by default on every new account.

What it needs

Nothing to set up first. The skill works as soon as it is installed. Your team’s email alerts go to the members of your workspace, so check who is listed in Settings > Members.

What your customers experience

Customer: This is the second time my order arrived damaged. I want to speak to a manager.

Agent: I’m sorry this happened again. I’ve passed your conversation to our team, and someone will reply to you here.

The agent does not promise a response time. It keeps answering simple questions until a teammate replies or takes over.

What happens behind the scenes

• Your agent escalates when the customer asks for a person or a manager, makes a complaint about your staff, raises a legal or safety concern, or needs a decision the agent cannot make, such as a refund or an account change.
• The conversation’s status changes to Escalated with a short reason, and it moves to the top of your Conversations list.
• Your team gets an email with the customer’s name, phone number, and the reason.
• The customer gets the tag you chose, so you can find escalated customers in CRM.

For the full picture, see Understand escalation.

Settings

Setting	What it controls	Example
Escalate repeated unresolved issues	Also escalate when the agent has tried to help several times and the request is still unresolved. On by default.	On
Attempts before escalation	How many failed attempts count before escalating: 1 attempt, 2 attempts, or 3 attempts.	2 attempts
Additional escalation criteria	Extra cases specific to your business, written in plain language. Optional.	“Escalate any request for a corporate or bulk order.”
Customer tag after escalation	The tag added to escalated customers. tkana creates it if it does not exist. Required.	Escalated

See Set your escalation rules for more examples.

Install it

Escalation is already installed on new accounts. If you removed it:

1. Go to Settings, then under AI click Skills.

2. Click + to open the Skill gallery, then click Escalation.

3. Review the settings, then click Install skill.

For more detail, see Install a skill from the gallery.

Good to know

Note

Escalation and tickets work together but are different. An escalation asks a person to answer in the conversation now. A ticket is a task your team follows up on later. See Support tickets.