Writes a tight escalation summary to engineering or management with a one-line headline, quantified customer impact, repro steps, prior attempts, and a single clear ask. Use when someone says "I need to escalate this ticket", "write this up for engineering", "this bug needs eng eyes", or a support issue must leave the queue for specialist action. Do NOT use for replying to the customer - use support-ticket-reply instead; do NOT use for assigning incident severity and coordinating an active outage - use sev-triage instead; do NOT use for the after-the-fact incident writeup - use postmortem-writer instead.
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name: Escalation Summary
description: Writes a tight escalation summary to engineering or management with a one-line headline, quantified customer impact, repro steps, prior attempts, and a single clear ask. Use when someone says "I need to escalate this ticket", "write this up for engineering", "this bug needs eng eyes", or a support issue must leave the queue for specialist action. Do NOT use for replying to the customer - use support-ticket-reply instead; do NOT use for assigning incident severity and coordinating an active outage - use sev-triage instead; do NOT use for the after-the-fact incident writeup - use postmortem-writer instead.
---
# Escalation Summary
Engineers and managers receive escalations all day; a well-built summary gets a response, a vague one gets queued behind everything else. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the partial escalation - sent early with "details to follow" - which burns the escalation team's first look and resets the clock on the customer. Write as if the reader has zero context and thirty seconds: if the first line does not tell them what is broken, for whom, and since when, the rest never gets read.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: qualify before gathering, gather before writing - an escalation written before the evidence exists gets bounced back for the missing pieces.
1. Qualify the escalation. Confirm the issue is genuinely outside support's scope to resolve. If a documented workaround or known fix exists, apply it instead of escalating.
2. Gather the inputs below completely. Do not start writing until everything is in hand.
3. Assign severity using the definitions below and put the label in the subject line or ticket title.
4. Write the five required sections in order, headline first. The first line is the whole escalation in miniature - spend the most editing time there.
5. Attach the evidence package.
6. Send through the designated escalation channel, never copying the customer.
### Step 1: gather inputs
- The original customer ticket(s) and any screenshots or recordings the customer provided.
- Affected account/order IDs needed to reproduce.
- Count of affected accounts or users, and their revenue or tier. Use hard numbers where available; estimate where not, and label estimates as estimates ("~40 accounts, est. from ticket volume").