You can measure it in about ten minutes from your own calendar. Take the hours you spend each week on customer escalations, count the share your team could have handled with clear ownership, multiply those hours by 52, and divide by 40.
The result is the number of working weeks a year your escalation system takes from you.
The calculation
- Look back over the last four weeks of your calendar and add up the hours you spent on customer escalations: calls, bridges, status meetings, and the messages around them. Divide by four for a weekly number.
- Go through those escalations one by one and mark the ones you wish your team had handled without you.
- Take the hours from the marked ones only. Multiply by 52 for a year.
- Divide by 40. That is the number of working weeks a year.
An example of the arithmetic: if you spend 10 hours a week on escalations and half could have stayed with your team, that is 5 hours a week, 260 hours a year, or six and a half working weeks.
No outside benchmark can give you this number, because it differs by company and by leader. Your calendar can. In my own operating roles at Cisco, I pulled 15 to 25 hours a week of escalation work off a director and a VP once ownership was rebuilt.
What the hours leave out
Executive time is the easiest cost to count. It is one of five. A badly run escalation also costs:
- Leadership time: the managers and senior engineers pulled off their own work to brief the executive.
- Trust: the customer's confidence that your team can handle the next problem without going over its head.
- The future relationship: across the whole product line, beyond the account that escalated.
- Future development time: the roadmap work that slips while the team explains itself.
Technical resolution closes the issue. Trust repair closes the escalation.
What to do with your number
Look at the escalations you marked and find the decision that came to you most often. Give that one decision a named owner and a limit first. Then do the next one.