Our customer support team is hitting their weekly ticket resolution speed metrics perfectly, but our customer complaints are quietly rising. We suspect they are gaming the system by closing complex tickets prematurely to keep their Scorecard green. How do we expose and correct this behavior using our weekly data?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a support team games their ticket resolution metrics, they are responding to bad metric design. If you only track ticket duration, your team will close complex tickets prematurely or split one issue into three separate tickets just to keep their numbers green. This is classic metric gaming, and it destroys your customer experience while making your weekly Scorecard look perfect.

To stop this behavior, you must pair your velocity metric with a quality counter-metric. If you track Average Ticket Resolution Time, you must also track Customer CSAT Score or Ticket Reopen Rate on the very same Scorecard. If your resolution time is incredibly fast but your reopen rate is spiking, the data immediately highlights that your team is rushing customers out the door rather than solving their problems.

During your weekly Level 10 Meeting, look at these two numbers together. If one is green and the other is red, it is an automatic indicator that the process is broken. You must make it clear to the team that a green velocity metric means nothing if the quality metric is red. By balancing activity with quality, you remove the incentive to game the system. Your team will quickly realize that the only way to keep their numbers green is to actually solve the customer problems correctly the first time.