Support Escalation SOP.
A support triage and escalation process that separates inconvenience from real customer harm and puts the right owner on the problem fast.
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Operating standard
Control without the corporate sludge.
Owner
The support owner manages the queue; the assigned resolver owns the issue until closure.
Response
Critical harm or security issues within 15 minutes. High-priority issues within one hour. Standard tickets within one working day. Customer updates follow the priority-specific cadence.
Metric
Priority-adjusted first-response and resolution time with customer reopen rate below five percent.
If nobody owns the process, the founder owns every emergency.
Purpose
Respond consistently, protect urgent customers, and prevent difficult issues from disappearing between support, product, and engineering.
When it applies
Use for every customer question, defect, service issue, complaint, security concern, refund request, or product feedback item.
Do not start blind.
Trigger to outcome. No meeting required.
- 01
Acknowledge the ticket and confirm the reported impact.
- 02
Classify it as question, defect, incident, complaint, billing, security, or feedback.
- 03
Set priority using user impact, scope, workaround, revenue, data, and time sensitivity.
- 04
Resolve known issues using approved guidance or assign one accountable resolver.
- 05
Escalate incidents and security indicators immediately to the relevant SOP and owner.
- 06
Update the customer at the promised cadence even when there is no resolution yet.
- 07
Verify the outcome with the customer and record the cause, fix, and reusable knowledge.
- 08
Tag repeated issues for product review and close only when ownership and follow-up are clear.
Authority must be explicit.
Know when to stop.
Escalate immediately for security, data loss, widespread outage, financial harm, legal threats, abusive behavior, or repeated missed response commitments.
If it is not recorded, it did not happen.
Make the generic parts real.
How teams break the process.
Treating the loudest customer as the highest priority
Sending 'we are looking into it' without an owner or next update
Closing the ticket when the internal task is done but the customer is still blocked
Related startup SOPs.
Make the process executable.
Download it, assign the real owners, set the thresholds, and test it with someone who did not write it.