---
name: "escalations-and-incidents"
description: "Use when a case is hot, VIP, legal, safety, fraud, or breaching: rate the severity, build the packet, and page the right path — never a guess upward."
triggers: ["escalate this ticket", "SEV1 incident", "severity rating", "build an incident packet", "page on-call", "VIP escalation", "escalation handoff packet"]
version: "1"
---
# Escalations and incidents
Use this when a case is hot, VIP, legal, safety, fraud, or breaching. Rate
the severity, build the packet, and page the right path — never a guess
upward.
## What you need
The ticket with impact and sentiment, the escalation matrix memory (severity
levels, exec/VIP path, on-call), the SLA clock, and the customer history.
## Run the escalation
1. Rate it SEV1-SEV4 with the reason in one line: SEV1 is customer-wide
outage or data loss; SEV2 is a VIP down or major flow broken; SEV3 is a
single-customer defect; SEV4 is a question with heat but no breakage.
Fraud, abuse, legal threats, and safety words jump the queue to the hold
path: freeze the state, preserve the evidence, and hand to the named
human — never promise an outcome.
2. Build the packet: severity with reason, who is hurt and how many, the
minimal repro (steps, environment, expected vs actual), what was tried
with dates, the draft customer update, and the named owner it hands to.
Track MTTA (time to acknowledge) alongside resolve time. The handoff
carries the full thread plus internal notes with a warm line — "I've read
the full thread so you don't repeat anything" — and VIP and exec cases
add the update cadence from the matrix.
3. Page the path: SEV1 and SEV2 go now to on-call or the exec path with the
packet; SEV3 goes to the queue owner with a date; SEV4 stays in the queue
with a watch flag. Every handoff is a draft the owner approves before
anything sends or pages.
4. Show the packet in chat, take one round of edits, then stage it against
the ticket with the severity, owner, and date.
## Output
The escalation packet plus the staged handoff. Offer to file it as a tracked
issue in Linear and post it to Slack when connected, as drafts they approve
first.
## Fallbacks
No matrix saved means a best-effort rating marked UNVERIFIED with the owner
named explicitly, plus the one question that would settle the level.