Managing escalations from key accounts: triage, escalation team, customer updates and recovery plans
For account managers, customer success managers and service delivery managers who look after important customers, especially at managed service providers and software companies. Prerequisite: 'Escalation, warm handoffs and follow-through', which covers when and how to escalate a case. 'Major incidents: coordinating and communicating an outage' is a useful companion for outages that hit many customers. This course is the account side of an escalation from one key customer: triaging it against business impact and the contract, setting up an escalation team with one customer-facing owner, writing updates that don't guess, agreeing a recovery plan with measurable exit criteria, and closing it properly. Examples draw on PagerDuty's published incident response practices, Atlassian's incident communication guide and the UK government's Model Services Contract guidance on rectification and service credits. Your company's escalation policy, severity definitions and authority limits apply.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Length
- About 92 minutes
- Contents
- 5 lessons · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 10 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Triage a key-account escalation: confirm the issue, the business impact, the contract terms and who is escalating
- Set up an escalation team with one customer-facing owner, a technical lead and an executive sponsor
- Write escalation updates that state impact, progress and the next update time without guessing at causes or fix times
- Write a recovery plan with root-cause findings, owned actions, dates and exit criteria the customer agrees
- Close the escalation: confirm with the customer, route remedies to the people authorised, and record lessons
Course outline
- 1.Triaging a key-account escalation: issue, business impact, contract and who is escalatingLesson · 18 min
- 2.Setting up an escalation team with one customer-facing owner, a technical lead and an executive sponsorLesson · 16 min
- 3.Writing escalation updates that state impact, progress and the next update timeLesson · 18 min
- 4.Writing a recovery plan with root-cause findings, owned actions, dates and exit criteriaLesson · 22 min
- 5.Closing the escalation: confirming with the customer, routing remedies and recording lessonsLesson · 10 min
- 6.Managing escalations from key accounts: triage, escalation team, customer updates and recovery plans: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 14 questions
- 7.Managing escalations from key accounts: triage, escalation team, customer updates and recovery plans: practical exerciseKnowledge check · 1 question
- 8.Final exam10 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
- PagerDuty Incident Response documentation: Different roles (incident commander, deputy, scribe, liaisons; flexible structure)
- PagerDuty Incident Response documentation: Customer Liaison (purpose, approval of messages, tips for honest customer messages)
- PagerDuty Incident Response documentation: External communication guidelines (timing, update frequency, long incidents, customers with special contracts, resolution)
- PagerDuty Incident Response documentation: Postmortem process (blameless review, owner, timing, external message, follow-up actions)
- Atlassian: Incident communication best practices (audiences, templates, update cadence, next update time)
- Cabinet Office: Model Services Contract – Guidance for Buyers, v2.2(A), September 2025 (rectification plan process, service credits as sole financial remedy below the service threshold) (UK)
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