Glossary · Platform
Two-way escalation
Two-way escalation is an alerting pattern in which every notification expects an answer: the recipient acknowledges or skips, 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 my-iris sends a push to the first on-call responder’s my-iris app: Acknowledge or Skip. 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 answer arrives — so my-iris does not assume success. It escalates: a voice call to the same person (press 1 to acknowledge, 2 to skip), then the next responder, then a supervisor, up to 20 attempts by default, until a human takes it. Because the acknowledgement is captured against the specific alert, you get more than “probably delivered” — you get proof of who had it, and when.
How an answer is handled
What “two-way” means in the app and on the call
Acknowledge takes the alert and resolves it; Skip hands it to the next responder at once, for that alert only.
The call asks for a keypress (DTMF): 1 to acknowledge, 2 to skip, 3 to hear it again. The digit is captured and timestamped exactly like a tap in the app.
A delivered push or a picked-up call never stops escalation — only an explicit acknowledgement does.
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 tap 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 answer from the recipient: tapping Acknowledge in the my-iris app, or pressing 1 on the voice call. (Skip in the app, or 2 on the call, hands the alert to the next person.) my-iris distinguishes “delivered” from “acknowledged”: a delivered push or a picked-up call does not stop the escalation, only an acknowledgement does.
What happens if no one ever acknowledges?
my-iris works through your list one person at a time — a push, then a call — and starts again from the top, leaving out anyone who skipped. After 20 attempts by default, the alert ends unacknowledged and its end report says so. 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 in the my-iris app and on voice calls.
How escalation worksEscalate until someone acts
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