You are here:
About Task Escalations in Agentforce Operations
Learn what task escalations are, how they work, and when to use them to automatically notify additional people as due dates approach or pass in Agentforce Operations.
Required Editions
| License Required |
|---|
This feature is a workspace that’s external to your Salesforce org and requires an Agentforce Operations license. To purchase an Agentforce Operations license, contact your Salesforce account executive. |
Task escalations help you manage time-sensitive work by automatically notifying additional people as the due date approaches or passes. Use escalations to keep managers informed, add backup assignees for overdue tasks, or send proactive reminders before deadlines.
What Are Escalations
An escalation is an automatic action that adds a person, team, or role to a task as either an assignee or CC at a specified time before or after the due date. When an escalation triggers, Agentforce Operations adds the configured person to the task, updates the task activity feed, and sends notifications to everyone involved.
You can configure up to five escalations per task, so you can create multi-tier notification paths. For example, send a reminder to the assignee one day before the due date, escalate to their manager one day after, and escalate to a director three days after.
How Escalations Work
When you configure an escalation on a task, you specify:
- Type: Whether to add the person as an assignee or as a CC.
- Person: Who to notify.
- Time: When to trigger the escalation, relative to the due date.
At run time, when the configured time arrives, Agentforce Operations automatically adds the person to the task and sends escalation notifications.
For a full list of task configuration options, see Configuring Tasks in Agentforce Operations.
Reminder vs. Escalation
Agentforce Operations uses different terminology depending on when the escalation happens:
- Reminder: An escalation that triggers before the due date
- Escalation: An escalation that triggers after the due date
This distinction appears in task activity feeds, emails, and in-app notifications.
When to Use Escalations
Consider using escalations to:
- Notify a manager or team lead when a task is at risk of missing its deadline
- Add a backup assignee to help complete an overdue task
- Send reminders to assignees before the due date arrives
- Ensure executive visibility for time-sensitive or high-priority work
- Create tiered notification paths based on how overdue a task becomes
Escalation Features
Escalations include several features to make them flexible and reliable:
- Configure up to five escalations per task.
- Escalations are configurable in days, hours, or minutes.
- Individuals, teams, roles, and people fields are supported.
- Escalations are integrated with workspace business calendar settings. To configure business calendar settings, see Configure Your Workspace Settings in Agentforce Operations.
- When due dates change, the escalations are automatically recalculated.
- Escalations respect out of office settings. To configure out of office settings, see Set Up Out of Office Settings in Agentforce Operations.
- Users can easily see escalation configurations from the visual indicator.
Visual Indicators
When a task has escalations configured, a yellow warning badge appears next to the Assigned to or CC section in the task. Hover over the badge to see the escalation configuration, including who is notified and when.
Next Steps
Learn how to add escalations to tasks in blueprints in Configure Task Escalations in Agentforce Operations.
Understand what happens when escalations trigger and how they interact with other features in How Task Escalations Work at Run Time in Agentforce Operations.
