Rules for Escalation of Answers, Incidents, Opportunities, and Tasks

The escalation function in business rules helps your organization track answers, incidents, opportunities, and tasks.

You can use rules for escalation to scan for problems, such as lack of follow-up by a staff member. Then the rule actions occur, such as reminding the assigned staff member, notifying a manager, or sending an email to a customer. Every escalation requires two rules. The first one specifies the conditions that schedule an escalation and create an escalation level. The second rule defines the actions that occur when the escalation level is reached.

To help you start thinking about escalation functions, these questions might remind you of situations you want to automate.

• How are answers, incidents, opportunities, and tasks assigned to staff members?
• How soon should answers be reviewed after being proposed or created?
• What is an acceptable response time for incidents?
• What time frame is acceptable for sales representatives to contact new opportunities?
• What happens if a task is not completed by its scheduled completion date?
• Who should be notified if answers, incidents, opportunities, or tasks are not handled in a timely manner?
• What happens if the next level responder does not take action?

The scheduling of escalation involves these escalation options:

• Relative time—Calculates the number of minutes or hours from a specific day of the week or from an event, such as time created or time updated. The relative time field must have a value for this option to be meaningful. For example, if you escalate an incident based on initial response and a response has not been sent yet, escalation cannot be scheduled.
• Response interval—Uses the work hours defined in your default response requirements. When you select this option, only working hours are used to determine relative time. If you clear this check box, incidents may escalate during non-working hours. The Response interval escalation option is available only in incident rules.
• Revalidate—Verifies that the object continues to match the rule conditions after being updated. If it no longer matches, the object is removed from the scheduled escalation queue.
• Recalculate—Reschedules escalations that are based on events (such as time updated or time of last response) when the object is updated and continues to meet the rule conditions. For example, if you schedule an escalation four hours after an incident is updated, the original escalation schedule is recalculated if the incident is updated before four hours elapse. The updated escalation is scheduled for four hours after the most recent update.
  Note: When the rules engine schedules an escalation but the Recalculate option is not selected, updating the object does not update the scheduled escalation. The escalation remains scheduled until it is executed or until revalidation removes it. For example, if you set an incident escalation action +4 hours relative to “Now,” the rules engine schedules escalation when the rule first executes. If the incident is updated and the conditions still match, the escalation time continues to be based on the original time, not the updated time.
• Clear Escalation action—Prevents escalation. For example, you might schedule escalation to ensure that a response is sent within a certain time frame, but you should clear escalation after the response has been sent. It is a good practice to select Revalidate to cancel the scheduled escalation when the Clear Escalation action is executed.

Note: Unlike incidents and tasks, answers and opportunities never reach a state where they cannot be escalated, as incidents do when they are solved and tasks do when they are completed. To help you manage these escalations, use the Clear Escalation action to prevent escalation and Revalidate to ensure that scheduled escalations are removed.

Before you create escalation levels, you must understand the Dbstatus utility, which escalates objects and runs by default four times an hour.