Why are incidents not escalating as expected when the revalidate option is enabled?

Environment:

All versions, Business Rules

Issue:

We have encountered issues with the "Revalidate" option on escalation business rules not behaving as expected.  When an incident is in 'Waiting on Customer' status for 5 days, a first email notification goes out to the customer and the escalation level changes to '5waiting'. If after another 5 days the status is still 'Waiting on Customer', the incident escalation level goes to '10waiting' and is auto closed and an email goes out.

However, when an agent makes an update to an incident (by updating Disposition or adding a note-which is not at all related to the status) after the first escalation, the revalidate function seems to assume the escalation rules are no longer hit and the incident gets stuck in the first escalation level.

Resolution:

When setting up escalation business rules based on Previous Escalation Level condition using the Revalidate function, please keep in mind that the default value of Previous Escalation level will be the first Escalation Level set on the record (contact, incident, etc).  Therefore, it's important to set a value for the previous escalation level option within the rule.

To help illustrate this behavior, see the following scenario:

Escalation Rule:
IF: Incident .Previous Escalation Level = Unspecified
THEN: Escalate to Level 1 (in 2 hours)

If the Revalidate option is checked, the Previous Escalation Level of the record will be "Level 1" and not "Unspecified", therefore, this record will not be escalated to "Level 1".

The working scenario, in this case, would be:

First rule:
Set Escalation level to Level 1

Second rule:
IF Incident.Previous Escalation level= Level 1
THEN Escalate to Level 2 (in 2 hours)

This information can also be found in the Product Documentation by searching after "Previous fields in conditions".  To access Oracle B2C Service manuals and documentation online, refer to the Documentation for Oracle B2C Service Products.

For more information, refer to Answer ID 2015: Using Response Interval, Revalidate, and Recalculate boxes with rules.