What is an escalation path?

Every phone setup has one, whether or not anyone wrote it down. The undocumented version is usually voicemail.

A good path names people and situations rather than describing a principle. Who, for what, and by when.

The last step is the one people forget. What happens when nobody at all is available needs an answer that is better than an endless ring.

Say you manage 140 rental units. Here's your path for an urgent maintenance call at night, as it appears on a single printed page. Step one: the assistant confirms the address and the problem, and tells the tenant to call 911 first if there's fire, gas or a medical issue.

Next comes a transfer to Luis, the on-call tech, which rings for 25 seconds. If Luis doesn't answer, step three transfers to Andre, the backup, for another 25. When neither picks up, the fourth step is to tell the tenant that a message is going to the manager right now, text the summary to your cell, and log the time. The page also lists what counts as urgent: no heat below 40 degrees outside, active water leak, no working toilet in the unit, lockout, and a broken exterior door. It carries a date and Luis's and Andre's rotation weeks. Ask any vendor how many fallback steps its system supports before you design yours.

An escalation path is a list of people and phone numbers, and both change. Someone gets a new cell number, goes on vacation or leaves the company. Meanwhile the path keeps sending 2 am emergencies to a phone in a drawer.

Nobody notices, since the path only runs when something has already gone wrong, and that might be once a month. So it needs an owner and a schedule like any other piece of equipment. Put one person in charge of it. Review it on the first of every month, and again whenever anyone on it is hired, leaves or takes time off. Print the date on it so that a stale copy is obvious.

Vacations cause the most trouble. When your on-call tech is away for a week, the quick fix is to forward his cell to someone else, and then nobody remembers to undo it. Change the path itself for that week, and put the change-back date on your calendar.

GreetKeeper follows the chain you configure: try to resolve, transfer if a rule says so, take a message if the transfer fails, and text the on-call phone for anything you marked urgent.

A transfer that rings out returns the caller to the assistant rather than dropping them, which is the branch most setups get wrong.

The transcript records which step fired and what the caller had said at that point, so you can see whether the rules are catching what you meant.