Glossary · Platform
Two-way escalation
Two-way escalation is an alerting pattern in which every notification expects a reply: the recipient acknowledges or declines, and the absence of an acknowledgement within a set window automatically escalates the alert to the next responder — repeating until a human takes it.
In practice
Silence is treated as failure
An alert fires and IRIS texts the first on-call responder: reply 1 to acknowledge, 2 to escalate. If they acknowledge, the alert resolves and the loop ends. If the phone is on silent, out of coverage, or the person is off-shift, no reply arrives — so IRIS does not assume success. It escalates: a voice call, then the next responder, then a supervisor, up to ~20 rounds, until a human takes it. Because the acknowledgement is captured against the specific alert, you get more than “probably delivered” — you get proof that a named person had it, and when.
Two-way escalation — frequently asked
How is two-way escalation different from one-way alerting?
One-way alerting sends a message and assumes it landed; a delivery receipt only proves the network accepted it, not that a human read or acted on it. Two-way escalation requires an explicit acknowledgement — a reply or a keypress — and treats silence as failure, escalating to the next person. The alert only resolves when a human actually takes it.
What counts as an acknowledgement?
An explicit response from the recipient: replying “1” to an SMS to acknowledge (or “2” to escalate), or pressing a key on an IVR voice call. IRIS distinguishes “delivered” from “acknowledged” and only the latter stops the escalation and resolves the alert.
What happens if no one ever acknowledges?
IRIS escalates through your configured chain for up to ~20 rounds — across SMS and voice, to successive responders and supervisors. Every attempt is logged, so even an unacknowledged alert leaves a complete, timestamped record of who was tried and when.
See the state machine that drives two-way escalation across SMS and voice.
How escalation worksEscalate until someone acts
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