Customer Escalations as a Sign of Poor CX
If customers escalate to your or leadership, it's a clear sign of a lack of role clarity and employee engagement in your post-sale teams.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT & CULTURECUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Joseph Loria
5/1/20251 min read


“Why is this coming to me?”
If escalations around your post-sale team are landing on your desk, or bouncing among execs, it’s not just a fire to put out.
It’s a sign. 🔍
A signal that your Customer Success strategy is unclear or misaligned.
I was talking with a CEO recently who was fielding daily questions like:
“Should we comp this renewal?”
“Do we re-onboard this customer?”
“Whose job is it to fix this issue?”
None of these questions were new.
But the team had no framework to make the call, so these items escalated. 🧨
When your CS strategy is muddled, a few things happen:
🚧 Teams default to reactive, ticket-driven work
🤷♂️ Ownership of key moments gets fuzzy
📞 Leaders get pulled into customer decisions that shouldn’t need escalation
And over time:
🕳️ Gaps widen
💬 Messaging gets inconsistent
📉 Customers lose confidence
Here’s the fix: not more headcount, but more clarity.
You need:
🧭 A shared definition of customer health
🎯 A way to prioritize customer work based on risk and opportunity
📚 Playbooks that give your team the tools and confidence to act
When your team knows who is healthy, what needs attention, and how to engage:
They don’t escalate.
They execute.
Escalations aren’t the enemy.
But if they’re constant, they’re a mirror. 🪞
And they’re reflecting a gap you can fix.