Identify Top Issues and Escalations

This workflow helps you identify the most common customer issues and understand why escalations occur.

Goal

Answer questions like:

• What are customers contacting us about most often?
• Which issues drive escalations or dissatisfaction?
• Where should we focus coaching or process changes?

Step-by-step workflow

1) Start with Topics or “Top Issues” dashboards (if available)

• Choose a relevant time range (30–90 days is often useful).

• Identify:

• top recurring topics/issues,

• topics trending upward,
• topics correlated with low CSAT or negative sentiment.

2) Drill down into a specific issue

• Click the topic/issue bucket to see the underlying conversations.
• Sample 5–10 conversations.

3) Review explanations to understand drivers

For each conversation, look for:

• what triggered the issue,
• whether the issue was resolved,
• whether the customer’s expectation matched the outcome.

4) Add escalation analysis (if enabled)

If your org tracks escalation reasons:

• filter to conversations with “Escalation Reason is present”
• group by escalation reason
• drill down and identify patterns (policy limits, long wait, missing info, etc.)

5) Take action

Common actions:

• update knowledge base and scripts
• coach on handling common objections or policy explanations
• fix product/process issues driving repeated contacts
• adjust routing/triage rules (if applicable)

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Figure: Topics dashboard showing distribution of conversation topics.