Escalation

Escalation hands a conversation to a named person or team in your help desk when a rule matches, with a note on the conversation saying why. The right person finds the conversation already in their queue, with the draft and the reason beside it. It is the one part of guardrails that changes anything in your help desk, and all it changes is who owns the conversation.

What happens when a rule hands over

When a rule with a target under Hand over to matches a new draft:

1. The conversation gets a note naming the target and giving the rule's reason, such as "Escalate to Billing team. Billing questions always go to a person." With note delivery, that line sits at the top of the draft note. With draft replies, Overdesk posts it as a separate note headed "Overdesk escalation", because anything in the composer would go to the customer.
2. Overdesk assigns the conversation to the target in your help desk. The note always comes first, and if it cannot be posted, nothing is assigned.
3. An alert titled "Handed to" the target's name, with the conversation number, appears on Alerts and goes to wherever you send alerts. See Alerts.

Overdesk never takes a conversation away from someone who already owns it. If it has an owner, the note still names the target and the alert still fires, but the assignment is left as it is. On Zendesk, a ticket counts as owned when it has an assignee.

What each help desk can assign

Help desk	Can be handed to
Help Scout	People and teams
Zendesk	Agents and groups
FreeScout	People. FreeScout has no teams
Intercom	Nobody. The note and the alert still arrive, and the Escalation tab says that nothing will be assigned

Set up a target

1. Open Guardrails → Escalation.
2. Press Add target.
3. Enter a Name. This is what your team reads on the note and in the alert, so use the name they know, such as "Billing team".
4. Under Assign to, pick the person or team from the list Overdesk reads from your help desk. If the one you want is missing, choose Someone else, enter an ID and type their ID from your help desk. Choose Do not assign if you want the note to name the target without assigning anything.
5. Check Kind. Picking from the list sets it for you. When you type an ID, set Team or Person to match, because a person's ID and a team's ID are different numbers.
6. Press Save targets.
7. Open the Rules tab, choose the target under Hand over to on each rule that should use it, and press Save changes.

A target receives nothing until a switched-on rule points at it. The Escalation tab warns you when none does, and under each target it lists the rules that hand conversations to it.

You can keep up to 20 targets. Only admins can change them. Renaming a target later keeps every rule that points at it working.

Rules without a target

A rule set to Nobody, just alert the team assigns nothing. If it is under Escalate to a human, it still raises an alert, titled "Needs a human" with the conversation number, so someone can pick the conversation up.

If you delete a target that a rule points at, that rule falls back to alerting only. It never guesses at someone else.

Be careful with broad rules

The urgency gates under Candidate gates match most of your queue. Pointing one of them at a person hands that person nearly every conversation, and the Rules tab warns you when you pick one. Narrow rules such as Bug reports or Billing make better hand-offs: "bug reports go to engineering" is the kind of routing escalation handles well.