Our customer support and operations teams are consistently hitting their weekly speed and volume targets on the scorecard, but our client satisfaction is dropping. How do we rewrite our metrics to stop our team from gaming their numbers at the expense of quality?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you measure activity without measuring the outcome of that activity, you invite your team to game the system. If your customer support seat is measured solely on how many tickets they close per week, they will close tickets as fast as possible, even if it means delivering sloppy answers or forcing the client to reopen the ticket later.

To stop this behavior, you must pair every quantity metric with a quality metric. If you track ticket close volume, you must also track first-contact resolution rate or post-interaction satisfaction scores. If you track sales outreach volume, you must also track the percentage of those outbounds that convert into scheduled discovery calls.

Look at your current scorecard and identify any standalone activity metrics. Ask yourself if a team member could hit that target while still doing a poor job. If the answer is yes, you have a gaming vulnerability.

This is where running on data meets the Accountability Chart. You do not need to build complex monitoring systems to catch people gaming. Instead, design balanced scorecard metrics that make gaming mathematically impossible. If speed and quality are co-dependent, the employee must maintain both to get a green box. If they hit the speed target but miss the quality target, the overall metric is red. This aligns their daily behavior with your actual business goals.