Years ago I worked for an ISP & managed hosting company as third line support. 1st and 2nd line support were pretty good, and would handle a lot of the cases that came through.
Generally by the time it'd reach us, it was something requiring more in depth troubleshooting.
They introduced a metric to measure ticket performance. The rough idea was "faster it's resolved, the better" (reasonable measure, if you're also tracking customer satisfaction), combined with "fewer interactions with customer the better" which was an absolutely stupid way to measure performance.
About a month after it came out, we were getting chewed out for our "conversion score" being low. Too many interactions with customers, and tickets taking a while to handle. No shit, we're the top tier of support. If it got to us it was bound to take time to resolve, and almost certainly involved a lot of customer interaction.
One of the engineers in the team managed to dig up how to get a "conversion" rate report up for any support engineer, though not the code that generated the figures, and very quickly realised that the way to get 100% conversion rate was just to resolve and immediately re-open the ticket as soon as you picked it up. We all promptly started doing that, and they stopped chewing us out.
If you incentivise the wrong behaviour, you're going to get results you likely don't want.
Generally by the time it'd reach us, it was something requiring more in depth troubleshooting.
They introduced a metric to measure ticket performance. The rough idea was "faster it's resolved, the better" (reasonable measure, if you're also tracking customer satisfaction), combined with "fewer interactions with customer the better" which was an absolutely stupid way to measure performance.
About a month after it came out, we were getting chewed out for our "conversion score" being low. Too many interactions with customers, and tickets taking a while to handle. No shit, we're the top tier of support. If it got to us it was bound to take time to resolve, and almost certainly involved a lot of customer interaction.
One of the engineers in the team managed to dig up how to get a "conversion" rate report up for any support engineer, though not the code that generated the figures, and very quickly realised that the way to get 100% conversion rate was just to resolve and immediately re-open the ticket as soon as you picked it up. We all promptly started doing that, and they stopped chewing us out.
If you incentivise the wrong behaviour, you're going to get results you likely don't want.