How Escalation Really Works

As you know I manage Software R&D. I thought I'd break an illusion some customers seem to have about their efforts to escalate an issue they may have with their deployment or a software product. This never happens at my employer but I've heard about it other places ;-)

Customer's conception: I escalate an issue up the Vendor's management chain and they will assign more people and better people to help resolve my issue. The more I escalate the faster my issue will go away (even if it is self-inflicted).

What really happens: Higher management sees the escalation and yawns "ah, another one" and forwards it on to the same people who have been dealing with it all along. Those people already know the situation is hot and have already assigned anyone useful even if it means taking them off of something else. Vendor agrees to provide more frequent status to customer. This means that the extra resources assigned end up briefing field support, sales, product managers and the janitors on status instead of actually making progress. Customer demands hourly updates. Vendor agrees to a daily conference call to update the progress which robs the resolution team of even more time to solve the problem. Customer resolution time takes one step backwards. Vendor higher ups want to be kept informed so internal status updates are required and daily internal conference calls are scheduled. After a day or two higher ups lose interest and no one other than the resolution team bothers to attend. Customer resolution time takes two steps backwards. Eventually the problem is fixed but only after consuming more people and taking more time than if the customer just relied on the Vendor to do their job responsibly. The over-use of time and resources means other Customer's problem resolutions start to lag so they hit the Escalate button. So the cycle goes...