I needed a task to be done by the services team in our company, I called them but no response, I've sent an e-mail to them explaining the issue and the urgency and I have CC'ed their manager and their manager’s manager.
Then I received a call from one of them [the services team] telling me that this is inappropriate escalation.
Is it true? Is CC'ing the manager in first e-mail regarding urgent matter considered escalation?
Is CCing the manager in first E-mail regarding urgent matter considered escalation?
Absolutely it's considered escalation, since you've gone over and above the normal means of contacting them (phone / email directly to the team) and you're explicitly pulling their manager into the thread with a hope of bringing the issue to their attention quickly.
In your case, putting the manager and the manager's manager in there is a step above that, it's a rather harsh level of escalation.
I received a call from one of them telling me this is inappropriate escalation
Whether it's appropriate escalation is another matter entirely, and depends on the context. Company losing 6 figures a minute type situation and they're ignoring it after half an hour? Definitely (but if that's the case, you should have been hounding them with calls and making your manager aware, not just send an email after half an hour.) I can't get into my PC and I've got a deadline? Almost certainly not.
Is CCing the manager in first E-mail regarding urgent matter considered escalation?
Yes.
To add, unless it is a well-defined scenario, urgent is a relative term. You might consider a glitch in your user account in the company portal to apply leave as urgent, whereas, for the service team, it might be urgent to deploy a security patch / OS Update to the systems in the company network. So, unless the urgency is associated with the overall organizational view, opinions may (and most likely will) differ.
I needed a task to be done from services team in our company, I called them but no response
If calling the service team is part of the process (instead of a service ticket in the portal, or an email - as applicable), then you were denied of a service and you have right to escalate.
I send an Email for them explaining the issue and the urgency and I CCed their manager and the manager’s Manager.
Two things here:
Then I received a call from one of them telling me this is inappropriate escalation
Other than the two points in the immediate previous bullet, ignore that inappropriate part, if they have any objection, let them respond on-record (replying to everyone in the original email). If they bring the topic back again, ask them how to escalate when you were not able to reach the over phone.
I've worked at a helpdesk some years back so let me give you the perspective from there.
People run into trouble at all times of day, but of course there are peak hours. Also, people have times they prefer to make calls. The helpdesk would be manned from about 7:30 but we'd start to get a lot of calls between 9:00 and 10:00 when people arrive at the office:
Some problems are more urgent than others. Not so urgent:
Others are more urgent:
All of these have happened to us in the space of a few months. A helpdesk needs to *triage** incoming requests. They usually do this with a simple formula: number of people affected X how blocking it is. A tech problem that mildly inconveniences everyone at the company may outrank one that totally blocks one low-level employee from working. Both of them go to the backburner for something that stops an entire department (like when Accounting can't print during tax reporting season).
A helpdesk in a serious company typically has a Service Level Agreement, stating how fast action must be taken on an issue of a particular urgency. For example:
That's quite a scale. In theory it treats all employees equally; in practice VIPs get a priority bump of course.
You'll also notice that phone calls have to be picked up pretty fast, while email handling takes longer. And the helpdesk always tells you to send an email or make a ticket. This allows them to control the timetable so that they can work on the most urgent thing.
General techniques for getting fast service:
EDIT: as Peter mentioned, I didn't explain why it's escalation.
The helpdesk prioritizes tasks, to ensure the most urgent ones are handled first. They have a Service Level Agreement with the rest of the company that lays down how this should be done. As a consequence, your request may not be on the top of the pile.
By CCing the manager, you're essentially trying to jump the queue.
It's sometimes appropriate to put extra pressure on the helpdesk, for example if your request seems to be ignored or is taking "too long". Sometimes things fall through the cracks, and sometimes the helpdesk makes a mistake triaging the urgency of your request ("affects only this user" vs. "whole department waiting on this person to get something done").
What's bad is if you start pressuring them unreasonably soon. If the SLA says they must acknowledge an email in 4 business hours, then contacting the manager in half an hour is not okay.
I don't think you're entirely in the wrong here though: you mentioned that you phoned them and they didn't answer. Generally the SLA for picking up the phone is pretty strict, a minute or so at the most. If you don't get anyone on the phone in ten minutes there's either a massive emergency or they did something wrong (monday morning staff meeting and forgot to tell people the helpdesk would be back at 11AM). The smart thing for them to do then is to put on a tape telling callers when the helpdesk will be back.
Is CC'ing the manager in first e-mail regarding urgent matter considered escalation?, that however does not mean you're wrong stating any of these points.
– Peter
Nov 20 at 7:21
Putting even the manager's manager into CC is definitely an aggressive move. If your request was so urgent that you only waited 30minutes(!), what did you expect the managers to do?
You should have called again (assuming you can't simply go there). Most likely, no one heard it ring, so yes, your CCs where inappropriate (and most likely useless).
If your company does not have the "cc your manager's manager" culture, then yes, that's escalation.
If your company doesn't have the "cc your manager" culture, then yes, that's double escalation.
In some companies, that is normal email procedure. If that is true for your company/department, in which case you should ignore the other person, or politely inform them that cc'ing both is normal procedure for your department.
The thing that I want to stress is that the answer is not an automatic yes, like other answers suggest.
Then I received a call from one of them telling me this is inappropriate escalation.
Given that it's from a team member, not a manager, disregard it. He/she should have complained by replying to the email.
Urgent issues often mean more extreme remedies. This can ruffle feathers but you don't answer to a team member from another team.
It's impossible to know whether this was appropriate escalation or not, but in effect what you did was send an email to the second-level manager saying "your first level manager's team are not doing their job, and your first-level manager is doing nothing about it".
That might have beem an appropriate response following a single phone call to a member of the team requesting some action. But unless the situation was life-threatening, or critical to the operations of the entire business, it probably wasn't.
Don't forget that the second-level manager would have no idea of what all this was about, so his/her only possible action in response to the email would be to go to the first level manager and ask "WTF is going on here?" - and that isn't going to resolve your problem any quicker, since the first level manager doesn't know anything about the situation either, except he/she just received an email complaining about something or other.
