Escalation of Service Requests

You can escalate service requests if they are not processed within a specific period of time. For example, incidents that are not resolved within 48 hours after the initial response can be escalated to the first escalation level.

Two different escalation levels can be used to notify the designated responsible parties that the response deadline has passed. The first escalation step can be triggered when the deadline is exceeded the first time, and the second escalation step can be triggered when the first escalation has exceeded its predefined deadline.

You use actions to control escalation and de-escalation.

Prerequisites

You have defined an action profile in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management under Basic Functions Actions Actions in Transaction Change Actions and Conditions Define Action Profiles and Actions .
You have ensured that the following actions are available in each action profile:
- IT_INCIDENT_DE_ESCALATION
- IT_INCIDENT_ESCALATION
You have assigned the action profile to a transaction type in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management under Basic Functions Actions Actions in Transaction Assign Action Profile to the Business Transaction Type .

Features

Service request response times are controlled by the service level agreement (SLA) profiles assigned to the service request. For more information, see Service Level Agreements (SLA).
You can schedule a batch job to escalate service requests automatically, for example, to set the escalation level and escalation dates. At the defined time, the batch job is automatically started and the action identified in the variant of RSPPFPROCESS is executed for all of the identified service requests.
You can execute the de-escalation of a service request directly from the Scheduled Actions assignment block. This lowers the Escalation Level and removes the corresponding escalation date.

Activities

To set up the batch job to automatically escalate service requests that are exceeding their due dates, do the following:

Run transaction SE38.
For each action, create a variant for the program RSPPFPROCESS to identify the actions and service requests you want to include in the batch job.
- In Application Key, identify the range of objects that you want to include in the variant.
- Choose the relevant action profile, for example, IT_INCIDENT_MANAGMENT.
- Choose the relevant action definition, for example, IT_INCIDENT_ESCALATION
- Select the Processing Without Dialog checkbox.
For each variant (for example, escalation and de-escalation), define a batch job using transaction SM36 and specify when to run the job.

More Information

Service Level Agreements (SLA)