Best practices for managing escalations

Because our Jira products are highly configurable, you can design your workflow and processes in ways that work for your team to manage escalations.

Manage escalations in Jira Service Management

Create a queue for escalations

You need to be an admin to create a new queue.

The queues within each service project can be configured to capture issues based on any type of criteria. You can add an Escalations custom field for your agents to populate, or you could create a component or label to use for escalations. Then, you would have the option to create a new queue for escalations using the Escalations custom field or tag. You could even apply a SLA to determine escalation time or create a custom automation rule to send an email to an agent managing escalations when the field is toggled or when a tag is added.

Create a status within your workflow for escalations

You also have the option to build an 'Escalated' status into a service project workflow. A queue can capture any issues in that status, and your escalation agents can work from that queue. You can build any number of statuses into your workflows, such as 'Escalated to Tier 2', 'Escalated to Tier 3', 'Escalated to Tech Support', or any number of statuses that queues can query against. Learn more about adding a status to a workflow.

Issue mentions

Agents could @mention a higher tier agent, who can comment on the issue internally or publicly, depending on how you want to manage this. A mention would send the mentioned agent an email notification. Your agents can also assign issues directly to higher tier agents depending on the workflow that you outline for your team

Escalations between Jira Service Management and other Jira products

If you are using Jira Service Management alongside a project management Jira product such as Jira, then you can allow Jira Service Management agents to escalate to other Jira teams in products on the same Jira site.

Create a linked issue in Jira

A Jira Service Management agent can create a linked issue in Jira to help investigate an issue. This can help your service project team track which bugs are being handled by the development team, and informs customers when the issue is being looked at by developers. Learn more about our best practices for software teams using Jira Service Management.

Issue mentions

A Jira Service Management agent can @mention a Jira user on a Jira Service Management request. When Jira Service Management and Jira are on the same site, you can add Jira users as collaborators on Jira Service Management requests. For a more informal escalation, you could allow the Jira collaborator to internally comment on a Jira Service Management issue when mentioned.