Use escalation only when normal support channels are too slow for the impact you are seeing.

What counts as urgent

• The helpdesk is completely unavailable to all users
• Inbound email is not being received at all
• A security incident or suspected data breach

A single user affected, or a cosmetic fault, is not urgent regardless of how it is labelled.

How to escalate

Set the ticket priority to Urgent and reply on the ticket with the word ESCALATE. This pages the on-call engineer. Outside business hours, escalation is the only route that triggers a page.