| name | escalate-a-customer-issue |
| description | Package a customer issue for the right internal owner with the customer impact, timeline, evidence, attempted resolution, current communication, and exact ask. Use when Support or Success needs Engineering, Product, Security, Finance, Legal, leadership, or another specialist to investigate or decide while the customer relationship remains owned. |
Escalate a Customer Issue
Prepare an escalation the receiving team can act on without reconstructing the customer history.
Keep the internal ask, product evidence, and ongoing customer communication clear.
1. Confirm why escalation is needed
Identify what is happening, who is affected, how long it has persisted, what has been tried, why the
normal support path is insufficient, and what changed now. Use the team's escalation and incident
policy rather than a generic severity ladder.
Choose the likely owner from the issue: senior Support, Engineering, Product, Security, Finance,
Legal, leadership, or another specialist. Suspected security, privacy, data-loss, legal, regulated,
or active incident cases follow the accepted urgent path immediately.
2. Build the evidence and timeline
Use approved ticket history, customer communication, account context, help content, team
discussion, project records, logs, screenshots, and previous attempts. Preserve source links,
timestamps, exact error text, affected environments, and what is still unknown.
For a product bug, use strawberry/product-engineering/research-and-report-a-bug to own
reproduction, technical context, duplicate issue search, and the engineering issue. This skill owns
the customer impact, relationship history, escalation timing, and communication obligation.
3. State the impact and exact ask
Describe breadth, depth, duration, workaround, deadlines, contractual obligations, customer goals,
and relationship risk only where the evidence supports them. Do not inflate urgency with an
unsupported churn or revenue claim.
Name what the receiving team needs to do: investigate, reproduce, decide, approve an exception,
provide a safe response, or commit an owner and update time. “Please help” is not an actionable
escalation.
4. Deliver the escalation pack
Provide:
- a one-line summary, current owner, and target team;
- customer impact and urgency with supporting evidence;
- timeline, attempted resolution, workaround, and current status;
- technical or product evidence and linked issue when relevant;
- the last customer update and the next communication commitment;
- the exact internal ask, decision deadline, and open questions; and
- a draft interim customer update when useful.
Keep internal commercial, security, employee, or other sensitive context out of customer-facing
copy.
5. Maintain ownership after handoff
Posting the escalation, assigning an owner, updating a ticket, filing a product issue, sending the
customer update, and offering a commercial remedy are separate actions. Follow active scoped
permission and verify each completed change.
Track the accepted owner, next update, and resolution evidence. Use
strawberry/operations/close-open-loops when the follow-through spans several teams or systems.
Close the customer loop only when the outcome is verified; capture a reusable answer or help-center
improvement when the resolution is stable.
