Escalating a case
Escalation is Connect declining to decide, not a case being handed upwards. The case stays open and where it was; a specific question goes to Needs You with the customer's words, the answer Connect would have given, and the rule that stopped it. A person answers that question. Refusing to improvise is the intended behaviour, not a shortfall in what Connect can do.
What stops a case#
Four kinds of question stop it, and they are worth telling apart because each has a different answer and a different owner.
| Trigger | What Connect will not do | Who is the right answerer |
|---|---|---|
| A commercial question | Invent a price, an SLA or a warranty that Knowledge does not support | Whoever sets commercial terms in this business |
| An action beyond autonomy | Send, promise or commit where the channel's rule says a person decides | Anyone with permission on that channel |
| An answer that cannot be grounded | Fill the gap with plausible general knowledge | Whoever owns the missing Knowledge |
| A promise it cannot keep | Commit to a call-back or an outcome it has no way to guarantee | The person who can actually make it happen |
What the person is asked#
One decision, with the material to make it. The Needs You item carries the case, the customer's own words, the reply Connect had prepared or the point at which it stopped, and the reason it stopped. An escalation that arrived as 'please review' would be a notification; what makes it useful is that it is a question with a default answer attached and the evidence for that answer visible.
- Approve the reply as written, and it goes through the same send boundary a person's own message uses.
- Edit it first, in which case your words are what the customer receives and what the timeline records.
- Answer the underlying question instead — supply the term, the fact or the decision — so the next case does not stop in the same place.
- Decline, with a reason. The case stays open and the reason is on the record.
The third option is the one that compounds. A commercial term written into Knowledge, or a correction stored as memory, changes what every future case is grounded in; approving a single reply changes one message. Both are legitimate, and only one of them is a fix.
What the customer sees while it waits#
Nothing, unless somebody tells them. A held reply has not been handed to any provider, so there is no message in flight, no delivery attempt and nothing in a sent folder. A waiting escalation is not a slow answer, it is no answer, and the customer's own clock is still running — which is why the queue is ranked rather than chronological.
What escalation does not change#
- The case state
- It stays open. There is no separate escalated status to manage, and no state machine to get stuck in.
- Ownership
- The case stays on the same person's relationship in the same workspace. Nothing is transferred anywhere.
- The channel
- The conversation stays where the customer started it; the decision happens in Needs You alongside it.
- What Connect may do next time
- A single approval is a decision about one message. Changing the rule means changing autonomy, Knowledge or a standing instruction.
Failure modes worth knowing#
- An escalation nobody answers behaves exactly like an unanswered customer, because that is what it is.
- Answering only the reply, never the underlying gap, produces the same escalation again next week with a different name on it.
- A workspace with autonomy set to ask on every channel will escalate ordinary work, which buries the escalations that genuinely needed a human.
- On the realtime voice path, a commercial breach is counted after the fact rather than blocked mid-sentence, so a reviewed call is worth more there than a rule is.
Questions#
Is an escalated case assigned to a different team?
No. Connect does not route a case to a queue of people; it stops and asks a question in Needs You, where anyone with the right permission can answer it. The case does not move.
Why did Connect refuse to answer a straightforward pricing question?
Because Knowledge did not support the answer. Inventing commercial terms is the one thing a business agent must never do, so it escalates instead. Adding the term to Knowledge is what stops it happening again.
Does the customer know their case was escalated?
Not unless somebody tells them. Nothing goes out while a reply is held, so from the customer's side the thread is simply quiet — which is why the wait is the thing to watch.