Salesforce Escalation Rules

Case escalation rules in Salesforce are used to reassign and optionally notify individuals when a case is not closed within a specified time period.

Salesforce Case Escalation rules are used to:

• Ensure that cases do not go unresolved by support agents or
• Ensure that the customer support team is meeting customer service-level agreements or
• Prioritize the support of important customers.

We can create as many escalation rules as we want but only 1 can be active at a time. A rule can contain many rule entries. Rule entry specifies the:

• Sort Order which determines the order of evaluation of rule entries.
• Entry criteria which determines that through which rule entry the case is eligible for escalation.
• Business Hours criteria for the rule entry.

It specifies the hours on which the support team is available to serve customers. It makes the escalation process more accurate. Business hours help organizations set the working time of support teams of different locations and different time zones which makes it easy to calculate the time related to cases.

An organization can have many different business hours for different time, teams and locations. Every rule entry can have its own business hours set according to which the time for escalation gets evaluated. Also, there is an option which ignores the business hours and calculates the time irrespective of business hours.

Evaluation criteria of escalation times:

It helps to calculate the Age Over time of a case. It has 3 options according to which it is calculated:

• “When the case was created” calculates the age over time from the created date/time of case.
• “When the case was created and disable after the case is first modified” does not escalate the case if the case record is modified after creation and the Age Over time is calculated according to created date/time.
• “Based on last modification” calculates the age over time from the last modified date/time of case.

Note:

The calculation of age over time depends on the business hours also, if selected.

Escalation Actions

These define that after how much time the case should escalate and to whom the case should be reassigned. Also, we can specify to whom the notification email should be sent of its escalation with respective email templates.

Note:

We cannot set the same Age Over time for 2 actions in a rule entry.

Case Escalations can be monitored under Setup -> Monitor -> Case Escalations.

Moving ahead, let’s now learn about Solution Management.