The situation
For two years my team carried the most demanding customer escalations in the business. Every serious one found its way to the same two leaders, a director and a VP. Decisions waited for them. Bridges ran long, and 9pm calls were normal. The engineers and escalation owners were capable. They had no written authority to decide, so they waited.
What we changed
- Named owners for the decisions that kept climbing. Each decision that kept landing on the director or the VP got a named owner with a defined limit, and those owners were told before the next escalation, not during it.
- The system, written down. When an escalation needed a senior leader and when it didn't, who spoke to the customer and how often, and who decided what. Written so the team could run it without asking.
- An overnight team that could own the night. We shifted US overnight escalation work to our team in the Asia-Pacific region and built them up to carry it. That took time: learning how to talk with customers under pressure, and how to debug and fix issues on a live network, which behaves differently from a lab. Once they could, overnight escalations stayed with them.
What happened
The bridges got shorter. The 9pm calls thinned out. Both leaders' escalation time dropped from 15 to 25 hours a week to roughly one: a single weekly meeting to review every open escalation, plus updates on specific cases on an agreed cadence. Other teams at Cisco borrowed the approach. Eventually someone senior asked whether a dedicated escalation function was still worth funding. That question was the result.
How the numbers were measured
Before and after the changes, I asked both leaders how many hours a week, on average, they spent on escalations. These are their own estimates, not calendar data. They describe one organization at one point in time. When we work together, your own numbers start in week one, measured with you.
This describes my own work as a Cisco employee. Cisco has not reviewed or endorsed this page.