Escalation
Moving a case from whoever first handled it to someone with more authority — the mechanism that gets a request to a decision, not the outcome of the request itself.
A real escalation path is defined in advance, not improvised case by case, and it needs an answer for what happens if the first person doesn't respond, not just who's first — a path with no fallback quietly becomes no path at all the moment the first name on the list is unavailable, which happens on an ordinary night, not as a rare edge case.
A large catering order lands close enough to closing to cross a restaurant's own configured cutoff. It's confirmed with the caller honestly, then held for review rather than silently dropped. The manager on duty doesn't see the alert inside the configured window, so it escalates once, automatically, to the owner, who approves it minutes later — and the caller, checking back, is told plainly what happened.
The most common mistake is treating escalation itself as an outcome, as if “it got escalated” answered what happens next. It only ever resolves into something else — approved, denied, transferred, or turned into a callback someone actually owns.
When a call or order crosses a line that needs a person's judgment, Dohos's chain runs to the named manager on duty, then the owner if there's no response in a configured window, covered in full on Escalation.
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