escalationlisted

# Escalation An escalation is not a big complaint. It is the moment the problem moved above the line where you normally operate, on their side or yours, and from then on you are managing two separate things: the incident, and what the incident did to the relationship. Fixing the first does not fix the second, and the accounts that churn six months after a resolved incident are the ones where nobody worked on the second. The failure this exists to prevent: **going quiet until you have the answer.** The silence is read as chaos or concealment, and both are worse than an update with nothing in it. --- ## What this needs **Shared context.** If an `account-context` document exists, read it first, particularly what customer success can commit to without asking, which decides how much of the first hour you can hold alone. Where it is absent, carry on and name the assumption. **Minimum: what happened and who is angry.** Enough for the holding response, the owner, the cadence and the pull-in decision. **Better with** the support and incident record, the contract, and a current stakeholder map. The last one tells you whether the person escalating can actually end the relationship. **Best with** a risk read already in hand, because it tells you whether this is an incident on a healthy account or the visible part of something older. --- ## Step 1: Establish what kind of escalation this is Three kinds, and they need different things. Get this wrong and everything after it is w