Workflow, Assignment, and Escalation Rules
What the exam tests
Workflow, assignment, and escalation questions test rule order, queue design, and SLA behavior. You need to know how a case moves from intake to the right agent and what happens when it breaches a commitment.
Core rules and concepts
- Assignment rules route work to queues or owners using conditions such as category, severity, language, customer tier, and channel. Rule order matters; first match or priority must be explicit.
- Always define a fallback queue. Unassigned work is an operational failure, not a neutral state.
- Escalation is time- or condition-based: milestones, SLA thresholds, and approval reminders. Escalation can reassign, notify, or change priority.
- Separate routing (who should work it) from escalation (what happens when it is late). Mixing them creates unpredictable behavior.
- Test rules with boundary values: exactly at SLA, after hours, and with missing data.
Worked example
A premium customer emails a severity-1 outage. The assignment rule set should route severity 1 to the major incident queue, then a second rule routes premium accounts to the senior team. If the first rule wins, the case goes to major incident; the senior team is notified by escalation, not by a second assignment. The reasoning: a single owner prevents queue ping-pong; escalation handles the premium commitment.
Traps
- Creating overlapping rules without a deterministic order.
- No fallback queue or default owner.
- Assuming escalation reassigns when it only notifies.
- Testing only happy-path data; missing language or tier fields break routing.