As many of our customers are using Zingtree decision trees to help standardize their business processes, time-based escalation has become an important part of these systems. Essentially, if a part of the process has not been acted upon for a certain amount of time, a new part of the process can trigger automatically.
You can escalate to send an email or a text message, call a webhook, and also move the process to another node.
Demo
The Demo Gallery contains a procurement process decision tree that requires a manager’s approval if the cost of an item is over $100. If the request isn’t approved or declined in one day, an email is generated, and the process becomes available for a supervisor to approve.
Click here to use the Procurement Process Demo Tree
How to Set up Escalation
Setting up escalation is easy – just edit the node, pick an amount of time to trigger the escalation, and choose a new node to jump to.
- Open Designer or Overview, and pick a node to edit.
- In the Node Editor, click the Escalate tab.
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- Pick a node to escalate to, and a time after which the escalation occurs.
- Make sure to click Save Changes when finished.
Hint: In the Overview tool, you can see any nodes that have escalation set up:
More info: You can see how the procurement process demo is built here.
Checking Escalation Status
If you are using Zingtree Task Manager, your tasks will show if any are pending escalation:
Hovering over the icon, or clicking the info button will give you an exact time when the escalation will occur. Here’s how the task info looks with a pending escalation:
If you’re not using Task Manager, the Recent Sessions tool (or Session List report) is a great way to see if there are any sessions with pending escalations.
Conclusion
Do you have any great ideas for using escalation in your decision trees? If so, please share with us. We would love to hear about creative, unexpected uses for this feature.