Escalation management

An escalation is a signal that the normal path failed. Handling it well matters; the more useful question afterward is why it was needed.

Assess severity from the customer's position

Severity is what it costs them, not how alarming it looks internally. A cosmetic bug blocking a regulated filing is severe. A total outage of a feature nobody uses is not.

Ask: what can they not do, how many people, is there a workaround, and is there a deadline attached. That last one converts a medium into a critical more often than anything technical.

Running one

Own it visibly. One named person, introduced to the customer, who does not disappear. Escalations get worse when ownership is ambiguous — the customer starts re-explaining, which is its own insult.