escalation-management

escalation-management is a skill for Claude Code from cbrock84/headcount. It costs 78 tokens per session (682 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A process for handling customer problems that have moved beyond normal support, including severity assessment, incident communication, leadership involvement, and relationship recovery.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during customer-facing outages, leadership escalations, major account risks, and post-incident recovery.
Why use it?
It creates clear ownership and communication when an issue is urgent, affects many people, or threatens an important customer relationship.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the customer-experience plugin — 7 skills shipped together

About the project

headcount is an organization of independently installable Claude Code plugins, each grouping skills for a department such as finance, security, or demand generation. Claude Code users install the departments they need and invoke their skills for specialized work; the catalogue entries are skills and related agent tooling from that organization.

cbrock84/headcount · 1,284 stars · on GitHub · cbrock84.github.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cbrock84/headcount/escalation-management
Any agent
npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill escalation-management
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install customer-experience, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for escalation-management

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/escalation-management.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/escalation-management)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/escalation-management"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/escalation-management.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 682 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00078 $0.00682
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00341
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00136
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00068

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8984940e0dda, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

escalation-management scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/customer-experience/skills/escalation-management/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Escalation management

An escalation is a signal that the normal path failed. Handling it well matters; the more useful question afterward is why it was needed.

Assess severity from the customer's position

Severity is what it costs them, not how alarming it looks internally. A cosmetic bug blocking a regulated filing is severe. A total outage of a feature nobody uses is not.

Ask: what can they not do, how many people, is there a workaround, and is there a deadline attached. That last one converts a medium into a critical more often than anything technical.

Running one

Own it visibly. One named person, introduced to the customer, who does not disappear. Escalations get worse when ownership is ambiguous — the customer starts re-explaining, which is its own insult.

Communicate on a stated cadence, and hold it even when there is nothing new. "No update yet, next update at three" preserves trust; silence destroys it faster than bad news does. Customers escalate again because they heard nothing, far more often than because of the underlying issue.

Separate acknowledgment from explanation. Acknowledge the impact immediately, in their terms. Explanation comes when you actually know. Leading with a cause you have not confirmed means retracting it later, and the retraction is what they remember.

Do not over-promise to end the conversation. Every commitment made under pressure to a frustrated customer is a commitment someone has to keep, and failing a recovery promise ends the relationship.

Executive escalation

When a customer reaches your leadership, the relationship is already damaged — the escalation is the symptom.

Brief the executive properly before the call: what happened, what we have done, what we are committing to, and what not to promise. An executive walking in uninformed makes commitments the delivering team learns about afterward.

Recovery

Recovery is not an apology. It is: acknowledge specifically what failed, say what changed so it cannot recur, and demonstrate it over time. Credits and discounts are compensation, not recovery — they close the ledger without addressing the trust.

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago Changed · +7 lines 8984940e0dda
  2. 6d ago First seen · 60 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 00346e4f8f44

Subscribe to this mod's changes

escalation-management is a skill published in the GitHub repository cbrock84/headcount (1,284 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 682 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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