We suspect our customer support team is gaming their weekly first-contact resolution and ticket closure metrics by rushing clients off the phone or closing tickets before they are fully resolved just to meet their targets. How do we audit our EOS® Scorecard to prevent our employees from optimizing for the metric at the expense of our actual clients?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a metric becomes a target, people will naturally find ways to hit it, even if it compromises the spirit of the work. If your customer support reps are closing tickets rapidly just to keep their weekly Scorecard numbers green, your metric is poorly designed. To stop this gaming, you must pair your volume or speed metrics with a quality-control metric. This creates a healthy tension on your Scorecard.

For every activity metric that rewards speed, you need a countervailing metric that measures quality. Instead of just tracking total tickets closed or average response time, add customer satisfaction or a ticket reopen rate to the same department scorecard. If ticket closure rates are sky-high but your reopen rate spikes, you immediately know the team is rushing closure without actually solving the root issues.

You should also regularly audit a random sample of closed tickets during your departmental weekly reviews. If you find support reps gaming the system, it is a GWC™ issue. They either do not get it, do not want it, or do not have the capacity to do the job with integrity. Address the behavioral issue directly in your one-on-ones, and adjust your scorecard metrics to ensure you are measuring true value, not just empty activity.