Our customer support seat hits their weekly target for average ticket resolution time, but our customer satisfaction scores are dropping because reps close complex tickets prematurely. How do we stop staff from gaming customer support measurables?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you evaluate a support team on speed alone, you incentivize them to sacrifice thoroughness. Staff will cherry-pick simple tickets, mark complex tickets resolved before the client is actually helped, and force customers to open new tickets to restart the clock.

To stop staff from gaming resolution time, counterbalance velocity with quality gates. You do this on your Scorecard using paired metrics:

- First Contact Resolution rate: the percentage of customer inquiries solved on the initial interaction without requiring follow-up.
- Reopen rate within 72 hours: the percentage of closed tickets that the customer reopens because the underlying problem was never fixed.
- Qualified Resolution Time: the average resolution duration calculated exclusively on tickets that received a positive client satisfaction rating upon closing.

If a ticket is closed in two hours but reopened two days later, the original resolution time is invalidated, and the metric records a failure for that ticket. The customer support seat owner must be held accountable for the reopen rate directly on their weekly scorecard.

When a support rep knows that prematurely closing an unresolved ticket ruins their reopen metric, they stop gaming the clock and focus on solving the root problem. Speed is only valuable when the work is done correctly the first time.