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.