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3. Customer Success
4. Technical Account Management
5. Customer Success Escalations Process

Technical Account Management Handbook

On this page

• Related Pages
• Objective
• Scope
• Definitions of Severity Levels
• Responsibilities
• Escalation Tracker Template
• Communication Process
• Related Links

• Technical Account Manager Summary
• CS Top 10
• Capturing Customer Interest in GitLab Issues
• Executive Business Reviews (EBRs)
• Account Engagement
• Escalation Process (Current)
• Gemstones
• Customer Health Scores
• Account Onboarding
• Customer Renewal Tracking
• Account Triage

Related Pages

• Using Salesforce within Customer Success
• Responsibility Matrix and Transitions
• Customer Success & Market Segmentation
• Customer Success Vision
• Support handbook
• Sales handbook

Objective

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

• 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:
  1. when the escalation is identified and created
  2. when incremental updates are required for executive or management visibility (e.g., daily updates for high or critical escalations)
  3. 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.

Related Links

• Technical Support Page and Technical Support Escalation Procedures
• Product Escalation Issue Template to request Product Team support for roadmap / future needs, prioritization of enhancements and/or issues and troubleshooting of customer issues.