Our customer support team is consistently meeting their target for average ticket resolution time, but our customer satisfaction scores are dropping because agents are closing tickets before they are fully resolved. How do we restructure this metric to prevent gaming?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When employees game a metric, it is rarely because they are malicious. It is almost always because the metric is poorly designed and incentivizes the wrong behavior. If your support team is evaluated solely on average ticket resolution time, they will close tickets prematurely to protect their numbers, sacrificing customer satisfaction.

To fix this, you must pair your speed metric with a quality metric to create a healthy tension. Tracking speed in isolation leads to sloppy work, while tracking quality in isolation leads to slow service.

Replace your single resolution time metric with two paired metrics on your weekly Scorecard:
- Average ticket resolution time, owned by the Support Lead.
- Ticket reopen rate, owned by the Support Lead.

If your reopen rate target is under five percent and it suddenly spikes to fifteen percent while your resolution time is green, you know exactly what is happening. The team is closing tickets without actually solving the customer's problem.

Reviewing these metrics side by side in your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ forces the leadership team to look at the health of the entire support function. It makes gaming the system mathematically impossible because the secondary metric will instantly flash red, forcing an honest conversation about operational quality.