Escalations run actions once a ticket has spent a set amount of time in a certain state.

They are useful to ensure that tickets are dealt with promptly. For example, you could use an escalation to increase the urgency of older tickets, or to automatically assign tickets that have gone unresolved for too long to a manager.

If you’re struggling to work out how to implement a particular automation, it’s also worth searching the Deskpro Knowledgebase, as we regularly add examples based on customer requests.

Creating an escalation

Create a new escalation by going to Tickets > Escalations and clicking Add.

When you create an escalation, you define what state a ticket must be in for elapsed time to count:

• The ticket has been open for: total time the ticket has existed without being resolved.
• The user has been waiting: total time the ticket has been awaiting agent, continuously since the most recent status change; for example, if the status is changed from awaiting agent and then back again, the clock resets.
• The total time the user has been waiting: cumulative time the ticket has been awaiting agent over its whole life.
• The agent has been waiting for: how long the ticket has been awaiting user, resets if the status changes; useful to detect tickets where the user stopped replying before the problem was resolved.
• The ticket has been resolved for: time elapsed since the ticket was resolved.
• The ticket has been pending for: time elapsed since the ticket has been marked as pending.

You also set how long the ticket must spend in that state for the escalation to apply.

You can also set extra criteria that the ticket must meet for the escalation to run. For example, if you specify a department, the escalation will apply only to tickets in that department.

You then define the actions that run when the ticket has run up the correct elapsed time and meets any criteria.

Increase urgency after user has waited a day

This is a simple example escalation to increase the urgency of Support department tickets if the user has been waiting more than a day.

Note that, instead of setting the urgency to a particular value, we increase the urgency by 3 (up to the maximum of 10).

Follow up automatically when a user stops replying

This is an example of how you can use an escalation to send a follow-up email if a user stops replying before the ticket is resolved.

In Admin > Tickets > Escalations, make an escalation like this:

Set any criteria for the escalation. For example, you might only want to send the reminder email for tickets in the Support department.

For the escalation action, we want, for example, to send an email to the user. None of the default templates is right, so we need to choose from custom Email templates or just create a new one.

Email templates are built up from the phrases in Setup > Languages. This means you can edit the phrase in a single place and have it update all the email and portal templates that include it.

If you’re only using one language on your portal, and don’t plan to enable any more in future, you don’t need to use a custom phrase - you can just enter the email text directly.

To make a suitable custom template, open another admin window and look through the templates for similar built-in emails (Tickets > Email Templates) to find phrases you can re-use.

Any custom text you need to add should be added as a custom phrase under Setup > Languages; click your main language and select Edit Phrases, then All Custom Phrases and click the Add Custom Phrase button in the top right.

Here’s an example of a custom phrase:

Create the phrase (with the same ‘filename’) in each language you have installed.

Here’s an example reminder template, referencing the custom phrase:

Subject:

{{ phrase('user.email_subjects.tickets_re') }}

Body:

{{ phrase('user.emails.greeting') }}
<br /><br />
{{ phrase('custom.ticket_reminder') }}
<br /><br />
<dp:ticket-messages />
{% if app.isPortalEnabled() %} <br /><br />
{{ phrase('user.emails.ticket_access_ticket_online') }}
<a href="{{ ticket.link }}">{{ ticket.link }}</a> {% endif %}

Now save the escalation.