For support
The work that saves an account rarely closes a ticket fast.
Support is the easiest function to measure badly and the most expensive one to get wrong, because the metric that is easiest to count rewards exactly the wrong behaviour.
Get this wrong and it backfires
The trap: counting tickets
Ticket count is the number every helpdesk gives you for free, and it rewards closing rather than solving. Agents learn to split, to close and reopen, and to route anything hard to somebody else. The person who spends ninety minutes on one furious enterprise customer posts a terrible day.
The fix is not a cleverer single number. It is two: pair resolutions with reopen rate, or with escalations handled, so the cheap way to move one damages the other. Most bad support leaderboards are one metric that should have been a pair.
What a reward looks like
What a support board looks like here
Rank the team on resolutions and escalations together, over thirty days, with reopen rate shown beside the score but not counted towards it, visible, and not something to chase. Measure first-reply time by the slowest nine in ten rather than the average, because an average is dominated by the quiet hours and tells you nothing about the queue at its worst.
Then leave individual ranking off. A support team already knows who is fastest, and the number that helps a leader is whether the team is keeping up, not who is bottom of a list.
Rewarding what the queue actually needs
A support queue rarely needs more speed. It needs somebody to take the ticket everyone else has scrolled past: the angry one, the one that needs an engineer, the one that has been open eleven days. Those are exactly the tickets a count-based board punishes you for touching.
Send whatever marks a ticket as difficult, such as priority, an escalation flag, or how long it has been open, and improve the odds of a reward for those specifically. It costs nothing to configure and it changes which ticket somebody picks at 4pm on a Friday, which is the entire game.
The same applies to the work that produces no ticket at all: the macro somebody wrote that saved everyone twenty minutes a day, the help article that stopped a category of question. A peer nomination covers those, capped daily so it stays meaningful.
Getting it in
Most helpdesks can send us a message when a ticket is resolved. Send the ticket id, the agent’s email so the credit reaches the right person, and whatever else you want to reward on, such as priority, whether it was an escalation, how long it took. Send the same ticket twice and it still counts once, so a re-sync is safe. It is an afternoon for whoever administers the helpdesk, and none of it needs us.
If you would rather see it working before wiring anything up, the free tier covers ten people indefinitely and every feature is in it.
Questions
The ones that come up
What should you measure a support team on?
Resolutions paired with reopen rate, escalations handled, and a first-reply time judged by the slowest cases rather than the average. Ticket count alone rewards closing rather than solving, and every agent works that out within a fortnight.
Will a leaderboard make agents close tickets faster and worse?
It will if you rank on ticket count. Pair it with something that gets worse when quality drops, such as reopen rate, so the cheap way to move the first metric damages the second.
Can we reward the hard tickets more than the easy ones?
Yes. Send whatever marks a ticket as hard, such as priority, escalation flag, or time open, and a rule can improve the odds of a reward for those. That is usually the whole point: the queue does not need more speed, it needs someone to take the difficult one.
Rank what this team actually does.
Free for your first 50 people. No card, no sales call.