Define the process for managing account escalations and define framework for communications, activities and expectations for customer escalations.
Scope
This addresses critical and high escalations for Enterprise customers. This can also apply to Commercial or SMB customers if there is a strategic partnership or relationship. This can also be leveraged for issues that affect a broad number of customers though the customer engagement model will differ. Any GitLab team-member can escalate an account on behalf of the customer.
Definitions of Severity Levels
Severity Level
Description
Cadence
Levels of Involvement
Critical
Major issue(s) impacting significantly impacting a customer's ability to deploy and/or use a solution, risking loss of and/or use a solution, risking loss of customer and/or significant risk to the relationship and brand.
Daily
VP of Sales, Product, CRO, CEO, VP of Customer Success
High
Major issue(s) impacting significantly impacting a customer's ability to deploy and/or use a solution, risking current adoption, future growth on the account and damage to the relationship.
Multiple times per week
VP of Sales, Product, CRO, CEO, VP of Customer Success
Medium
Issue(s) impacting customer's ability to deploy and/or use the product, risking current adoption and renewal.
Weekly to Bi-weekly
VP of Sales, VP of Customer Success
Low
Issue(s) impacting customer's ability to deploy and/or use the product, risking customer value realization, timeline, customer satisfaction and adoption levels.
Standard Communication
Director of Customer Success, Account Manager
Cadence refers to the cadence of internal and external meetings and communications to the customer.
Level of involvement defines scope of internal communication and awareness. Others can be included based on the type of issues involved.
Responsibilities
Technical Support is responsible for managing Low and Medium level escalations, leveraging other teams (e.g., Technical Account Managers (TAMs), Engineering) as needed.
TAMs are responsible for managing High and Critical level escalations (not including technical support tickets managed by SLA's), leveraging other teams (e.g., Support, Engineering) as needed.
If no TAM is assigned, the escalation will be managed by Technical Support.
When customer escalation processes are initiated by Support (low and medium) or Customer Success (Medium and High), the escalation document should be posted into the internal-only GitLab Slack channel #escalated_customers.
Escalation Tracker Template
Link to template (only acessibly by GitLab team-members). Save the document for each individual customer and replace (CUSTOMER) with the customer name.
Executive Summary
This section does not need to be updated daily but should be updated when there are changes to the status of the overall engagement (e.g., top-level issue status, milestones, etc.).
Milestones should include key customer and GitLab milestones.
Communication Process
When a customer escalation is defined, the escalation document should be posted into the #escalated_customers channel by the escalation owner (i.e., Support for Low/Medium severity, TAM for high/critical severity escalations). The posting to this channel should occur:
when the escalation is identified and created
when incremental updates are required for executive or management visibility (e.g., daily updates for high or critical escalations)
when the escalation is closed or risk reduced to standard business process to manage (i.e., issue resolved and monitoring the solution)
The #escalated_customers is for awareness only and is not intended to replace account or support channels. Specifically, this channel is NOT intended for:
Initiation of escalations
The detailed tracking and interactions for the escalation
The initiation of an escalation and detailed tracking will continue to take place in the account or support channels.
Product Escalation Issue Template to request Product Team support for roadmap / future needs, prioritization of enhancements and/or issues and troubleshooting of customer issues.
