This document outlines the process for managing existing support tickets or internal requests, which, due to business-critical situations, require a resolution faster than what is defined by our normal Support response times.
There are two types of escalations:
NOTES:
The following two types of tickets can be escalated using this process.
Either of these can be escalated if the current course of action is unlikely to provide a positive outcome and meet critical business objectives.
GitLab Support targets a 95% SLA achievement KPI. This means that some tickets breaching is expected. Our SLA is for a First Reply but we also internally track the next reply.
Requesting eyes on, asking for an immediate opinion on, or requesting the escalation of a ticket in any Support related Slack channel creates unnecessary stress on Support Engineers who may be in the midst of working on other priority tickets.
Depending on whether you want to draw attention to either a Zendesk ticket or an issue created in internal-requests
, follow the steps below.
Note: If you do not have Zendesk access, please request a Light Agent account to obtain it.
Depending on the request the Support Manager on-call will decide that an escalation request is without merit. In these cases, it's important to set expectations with the requester by documenting the following in the escalation issue.
Every escalation that is de-escalated
must include the De-Escalation
label.
Urgency Level | Definition |
---|---|
Not Urgent | We need increased visibility on the ticket/issue and a response from Support within the next 2 hours. This escalation is not urgent, and the overall impact is low . |
Timely | We need to address potential or existing customer dissatisfaction on the ticket/issue with a response from Support within the next 1 hour. This escalation has a certain level of urgency, and the overall impact is medium . |
Urgent | The ticket/issue may become an emergency if no follow-up is provided within the next 30 minutes and may lead to customer dissatisfaction. This escalation is urgent, and the overall impact is high . |
Important The support escalations form will be available during our support hours, outside of these hours the form will be disabled.
The following instructions apply to escalating both Zendesk tickets and issues within the internal-requests
issue tracker.
WARNING: When escalating a US Federal case, do not fill in the customer's name, instead populate the
Customer
field with a link to the organization in SFDC.
Submit Escalation Request
.Once submitted, an issue is created in the Escalations issue tracker. The issue is automatically assigned to the Support Manager on-call and will be used to keep a log of the escalation. Additionally, a thread will be created in the #support_escalations Slack channel.
Please be aware that we take into consideration the current state of the entirety of the ticket queue and already existing escalations when determining the appropriate prioritization for your escalation.
If a request for an escalation is posted in the wrong channel, simply add the :escalate:
emoji as a reaction to the post, and the user will be advised of the proper way to request an escalation via a Slack Workflow.