Our customer support team consistently hits their weekly closed ticket targets, but customer satisfaction is plunging because reps cherry-pick easy tickets and rush complex issues out the door. How do we redesign Scorecard measurables to prevent front-line staff from gaming production numbers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Any single measurable tracked in isolation will eventually be gamed. When you measure only volume, humans optimize for speed at the expense of quality. If customer support reps know they are evaluated solely on closed tickets per week, they naturally hunt for password resets and close intricate bug reports prematurely. The solution is never more supervision. The solution is pairing every speed or volume metric with a balancing quality constraint owned by the same seat.

On your departmental Scorecard, do not allow closed tickets to stand alone. Pair it with a counter-balancing metric such as ticket reopen rate or first-contact resolution percentage. For instance, set a weekly target of forty tickets closed per representative, coupled with a requirement that the seven-day ticket reopen rate stays under five percent. If an agent closes fifty tickets but twelve percent of them bounce back because the customer problem was never actually resolved, the box turns red.

You can also measure average age of open unresolved tickets. This immediately eliminates cherry-picking because leaving hard tickets untouched drives the aging metric into the red.

When you establish paired measurables, you force the seat owner to manage the tension between velocity and thoroughness. In the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a Scorecard measurable must reflect the true standard of performance, not just crude activity. When the paired metric drops red, it lands on your departmental Level 10 Meeting agenda for IDS. Either the rep lacks GWC for the seat, or the standard operating procedure for escalation is broken. Fix the metric pairing first, and the gaming stops.