What is escalation rate?
Escalation rate measures the percentage of customer enquiries passed up to a higher level of support, where your immediate support team hasn’t been able to resolve a query or the customer is unhappy with the response. A low escalation rate suggests your teams are efficiently handling most customer queries, but a high escalation rate shows there’s room for improvement.
Monitor a high escalation rate and you can work on improving your support services to bring the rate down and continue to grow a healthy customer satisfaction score.
How do you calculate your escalation rate?
To calculate your escalation rate, you first need to confirm the number of customer enquiries that were escalated to a senior agent or manager. You then divide that by the total number of enquiries you received and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage.
Say your teams handled 4,000 queries in a month and 250 of those were escalated, your escalation rate is:
(250 ÷ 4,000) x 100 = 6% escalation rate
Why does the escalation rate matter?
The escalation rate is a critical indicator of how well your support teams and general operations are performing. A high escalation rate may indicate a need for more training for support agents, more resources to tackle higher call volumes and enquiries, or it could highlight a need for system improvements to increase overall customer service efficiency and improve the customer experience.
By actively managing your escalation rate, you can make more informed business decisions and understand where to best allocate your resources to take action on levelling up customer support services.
What is a good escalation rate benchmark?
A healthy escalation rate will typically sit between 5% and 10%, suggesting your support teams are efficiently handling most customer inquiries without the need to escalate complaints or unsolved queries. However, the use of automation tools like advanced AI assistants are helping business leaders improve many aspects of query handling with new strategies to significantly reduce the risk of escalation:
- The average response time reduces from minutes to seconds, since customers get instant answers to queries without the frustrating wait time
- Since AI assistants can integrate with popular service apps and platforms like Zapier, Jira and HubSpot, the speed of automation holds true for tasks or transactions that need to be carried out to resolve a query as much as it does for customers who only need information
- Customers can get help any time of the day or night from an AI assistant, on any channel, in 130+ languages, so getting help is never a struggle or inconvenience
AI automation not only removes common frustrations that can lead to complaints and dissatisfaction, it opens up opportunities for your support teams to reduce their workload and stress levels. They’re then more available for customers with complex, sensitive or unusual enquiries, which also prevents those issues from escalating.
Using AI to make way for vital human connection
Stena Line ferries use an AI assistant to answer 99.88% of customer enquiries, but where an AI assistant can answer most of your routine enquiries, there will always be a small percentage of customers who need to speak with a human agent to get their query resolved. In this case, live chat is a critical link between your AI assistant, your customers, and your teams to honour every type of query with the right kind of support it needs.
Benefits of live chat
If an AI assistant doesn’t know the answer to a question and your contact teams are online, your AI assistant can seamlessly pass your customer over to a human agent using live chat, so the query can be immediately addressed and resolved. What’s more, as your live chat feed starts to highlight where customers struggle most with information or your processes, or shows where any support bottlenecks lie, you can quickly work on improving those by training your AI assistant to answer more related queries.
The result is AI-powered chats go up and live chat requests go down, and with the average success rate for our advanced AI assistants being 96% (that is, recognising and resolving the query without any help), only the most unusual, challenging or sensitive queries ever pass through to your contact teams, leaving just a small portion of overall enquiries open to the risk of escalation.
Using AI to ease growing frustration
We know from experience 35% of the queries our AI assistants deal with come in when traditional offices are closed and no customer wants to be met with a frustrating dead end or silence. With the help of an AI assistant, you’re always available and can at least keep the customer up to date on progress. Not only that, you can take visible action to to show your commitment to sorting out their issue quickly, say they’re having technical issues.
Link up your AI assistant with a ticketing system like Jira and you can automatically log a support ticket at any time of the day or night for your teams to pick up as soon as they start work. This secures real time engagement with your customer 24/7, offering reliable support they can grow to depend on, even for the most highly regulated industries. 83% of Legal & General Insurance customers who’ve used their AI assistant now turn to it first for support over traditional methods like phone or email.
With less queries and happier customers, there’s far less call for escalation.
Launch an AI assistant today
If you’re ready to try out an AI assistant, you can create one in minutes for free using just your website URL. As your AI assistant takes on more and more queries over time, you only ever pay for what you use, so it’s an easy and affordable way to reduce your escalation rate, starting right now.
