Incident escalation management

[Taiyo]

Hi all,

 - Requirement

I have a requirement that users need to keep track of incident tickets they escalated.

 - Question

Are there any OOTB functions that can be used to achieve the requirement with the below background in mind?

Or any example mechanisms to manage escalated tickets are appreciated.

 - Background

On our instance, when users escalate an incident, they just maually update 'assginment group' and 'assigned to' fields to higher level group. In this way, they have no means to track their escalated tickets. To let the users keep track of tickets which are escalated by themselves, I initially thought that we can use 'watch list' field. We can either manually add users who escalated the ticket to watch list or create a business rule to do the same thing when 'assginment group' and 'assigned to' fields are updated.

However, 'watch list' field is already used for different purpose, so now I'm thinking that I can create a new field (let's call this field 'escalated by') with the same data type as 'watch list' to record who escalated the ticket. So that we can use this field to show a list of tickets that have been escalated by a specific user.

Before implementing the above idea, I'd like to make sure that I have no easier options (possibly with OOTB functions) to achieve this.

Thank you for your support.

[HIROSHI SATOH · Accepted solution]

There is no OOTB feature that meets the requirement. There are three possible OOTB features:

- You can see how many reassignments have occurred with "Reassignment Count".

- You can see the assignment group and assignment changes by manually reviewing the activity.

- You can manage the assignment group and assignment changes by creating child incidents and escalating them.

If you use "Escalated By", you need to consider the case of re-escalation after escalation.

[Taiyo]

It seems like I need to create a custom field 'escalated by' to meet my requirement. 

If there is any better way to manage escalated incident tickets, please suggest...

@HIROSHI SATOH 

I did not know about "reassignment count" field. Thank you.

If there is no other suggestion from other community members within a week, I'll mark your response as solution.