Our customer support team is consistently hitting their weekly target for closed support tickets, but we found out they are gaming the system by closing complex tickets prematurely and telling clients to open a new ticket if they still have issues. How do we structure our scorecard metrics to prevent people from gaming their targets?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Whenever you measure a single operational activity, human nature will find the path of least resistance to hit that target. If you only measure speed or volume, quality will inevitably suffer. To prevent your team from gaming the system, you must introduce a counter-balancing metric on your scorecard.

A counter-balancing metric pairs quantity with quality. If your customer support seat owns a metric for weekly tickets closed, they must also own a metric for customer satisfaction or ticket reopen rate.

For example, you could track the number of tickets closed alongside the percentage of tickets reopened within forty-eight hours. If the reopen rate spikes, it immediately exposes that the team is closing tickets prematurely just to hit their volume targets.

This approach forces your team to balance efficiency with effectiveness. It ensures they GWC, meaning they get it, want it, and have the capacity to do the job right. When you review your scorecard in your weekly Level 10 Meeting, any imbalance between these two metrics will stand out immediately. This allows your leadership team to catch operational shortcuts before they damage your client relationships and erode your enterprise value.