Your Support Queue Is a Defect Report
From what I saw, the escalation rate is the most misunderstood metric in tech operations. Every escalation is one of two things: Someone in support could have resolved it. For example: missing access rights, missing knowledge, no written standard for what a complete answer contains. Another situation I saw was that the ticket landed with the wrong person because the routing ran on assumed specialty, instead of actual skills and workload. Those are defects in the support system, so the support manager is responsible for them. Nobody in support could have resolved it because the software produced it. The answer lies in the code, in the data, or in a design decision made years ago. So the ticket climbs, level one to level two, then to level three. At the top of that ladder sits a maintenance team or a squad that inherited the codebase. Sometimes, it is nobody at all. Those are defects in the delivery system. You own them, and you almost never see them. ...