The escalation matrix every MSP quotes but never writes down
Ask an IT service team "what happens when a P1 fires at 2am?" and you'll get a confident answer. Ask to see it written down — with names, timers and fallbacks — and the room goes quiet.
That gap is where deals die in procurement. Buyers don't ask "can you fix servers?" They ask: "Show me your escalation matrix." If the answer lives in someone's head, you fail the question in the room.
The 5-row matrix that answers it
| Severity | First responder | Acknowledge in | Escalate to if stalled | Client update every |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 — outage | On-call engineer | 15 min | Service lead after 30 min | 60 min |
| P2 — degraded | Duty tech | 1 h | Service lead after 4 h | 4 h |
| P3 — annoyance | Ticket queue | 1 business day | Team lead after 3 days | On change |
| P4 — request | Queue | 3 business days | — | On change |
| Security event | On-call + IR lead | 15 min | Owner after 1 h | 60 min, written |
Five rows. One page. It turns "we'll take care of you" into something a buyer can put in front of their boss.
Three rules that make the matrix real
- Timers belong to the page, not the person. When the SLA clock is visible on a shared board, escalations happen on their own. Silence is the enemy — nobody re-reads a doc at 2am.
- Every row has a fallback human. If the primary is asleep/unreachable, the matrix names who picks up. A matrix with a single name per row is a wish, not a matrix.
- Write the client update before you need it. Template the 60-minute P1 update: what happened, what we know, what we're doing, next update at HH:MM. Ninety seconds to fill, and it reads like competence.
Why this closes deals
Procurement never lost a deal because an MSP couldn't restart a server. They lose deals on knowable promises: who responds, how fast, what happens when it goes wrong. A one-page escalation matrix is the cheapest sales asset a service team owns — and almost nobody has one.
We built a full kit around this: runbooks, escalation SOPs, onboarding checklists and monitoring drills, packaged as the Ops Starter Kit — instant download, $19: https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit
Want it white-labeled under your brand for client handoffs? We do custom builds too: https://hive80lab.gumroad.com
HIVE80 Lab builds white-label AI-agent operations kits for IT service teams. Replies: hcchb@proton.me.
