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How to Stop Cherry-picking in Customer Service and Zendesk

Writer's picture: Mark SherwoodMark Sherwood

How to Stop Cherry-picking in Customer Service and Zendesk

Imagine it’s a beautiful Friday afternoon. You’re excited for the weekend ahead and proud of the work you and your team have accomplished this week. 


But then, while you look at the teams’ metrics, you notice one of your slower performers has tripled their output. That’s fantastic! 


Or is it…? It’s fantastic if they’ve increased their efficiency and improved their ticket count, but it’s not so fantastic if they are getting those numbers by cherry-picking. 


Let’s examine how to manage cherry-picking in customer service effectively and how this can lead to more streamlined operations, happier customers, balanced workloads, and improved morale internally. 


Cherry-picking Meaning in Customer Support


Cherry-picking in customer service involves simply taking the “good” tickets and leaving the “bad” tickets.

For example, if you have some text expanders that work well for “new customer” or “refund requests,” then an example of cherry-picking here is that your agents scan the queue for only these tickets, as they are quick, simple, and easy. This boosts their numbers and looks good on paper.


Other examples can include selecting tickets based on SLAs, ticket priority, or tags, all of which are easy to set up and view in Zendesk.


How to Spot Agents Who Cherry-pick (or Cherry-pickers)?


Cherry-pickers could be anyone on the team. Often, it’s easy to spot as you will see an increase in an agent’s ticket numbers vs. their or the team’s average.

Other times, agents may be sneaky and still cherry-pick but not inflate their numbers. This requires a deeper dive into your agents' tickets and kinds of tickets to identify any trends.


Zendesk Explore is a good way to get many of these details with minimal effort on a manager’s part!

Specifically, you can break down the indicators into two categories:


Quantifiable indicators include: 


  • More tickets closed per agent compared to previous averages or team averages. 

  • Tickets solved at first contact.

  • High or low handle time inconsistencies.

  • A higher proportion of solved tickets with a specific tag.

  • An extremely short first response time in comparison to the team.


Behavioral indicators include: 


  • Patterns in ticket reassignments.

  • Avoidance of certain ticket types or complexity issues.

  • Fewer questions in the team spaces about complex tickets.


Depending on the channel, cherry-picking can look different. 


Cherry-picking in customer service emails can be all of the above, as well as skipping longer email threads or complicated tickets by glancing at them.


Cherry-picking in customer service chat can be a bit harder to find but often involves transferring difficult interactions, if applicable, or, unfortunately, letting chats end by ignoring them. 


Cherry-picker

The Negative Impact of Cherry-picking


When agents cherry-pick, they skip over more complex or time-consuming tickets. Which might involve interacting with an angry customer, resolving a payment issue, or completing an in-depth and challenging bug report. 

The result of cherry-picking is that those cases have a slower response time than all others. This often gives customers the impression that their issues aren’t taken seriously and can lead to a lower CSAT. 


Cherry-picking is also visible to other members of the team. 


Everyone notices if a couple of really challenging cases hang out at the top of the queue without anyone touching them. Left unchecked, this will likely cause resentment among those who work slower and have lower numbers. 


An uneven workload distribution can increase stress, even burnout, and lead to higher turnover rates. 


When Cherry-picking Might Make Sense


Wait, what? 


Yup, it’s true. There are use cases where cherry-picking may actually be good for business and morale, but they are more exceptions than the norm. 


Some examples include crisis or incident management, VIP customer scenarios, and other SLA priorities in unique situations. 


Cherry-picking is often used as a training mechanism. When new agents start and are slowly building their confidence, they have no choice but to cherry-pick to increase their experience with and understanding of your product slowly.


It can be challenging to know exactly when to cut this off, but it's a good idea to err on the side of relatively soon before it becomes a habit. 


Cherry-picking can also help your team have a massive impact on numbers quickly, so if you’re struggling with a big backlog and low morale, it’s often worth trying.


The difference is that it’s announced and agreed on by everyone rather than something happening in the background against the team's expectations.


Note that you can set up smart routing with Zendesk to reduce this occurrence. You can add tags, skills, and more, and this can automatically filter those SLA, Urgent Priority, and Incident tickets as needed to avoid cherry-picking. 


How to Stop Cherry-picking in Customer Service


Apart from smart routing, a manager can do a lot to address and stop cherry-picking from both a managerial/behavioral point of view and technical tooling, particularly with Zendesk. 


The first step is to identify that it is an issue. You don’t want to accuse a fast agent of cherry-picking if they are just being fast and producing a high quantity of high-quality tickets. 


Once you’ve proven it’s an issue by examining the data or talking to your agents, investigating possible root causes is a good idea.


Cherry-picking is often a result of unclear protocols, knowledge gaps, or misalignment in expectations. 

You can implement some systemic changes like: 


Implementing a First-in, First-out (FIFO) or Claim-Next system

It aligns the team and encourages them to take the next available ticket rather than whatever they want. 


Enforcing clear escalation paths for complex tickets

If a ticket is complicated and it has to sit with an agent while they figure it out, there’s a greater chance it will just sit there.


However, if the agent knows that they have support from other escalated teams or subject matter experts and they can escalate it easily (when appropriate) to them, they are less likely to skip the ticket. 


Clear training policies

Such procedures and policies outline proper ticket prioritization, SLAs, and fair ticket distribution. 


Regular feedback meetings 

To review the data and discuss an agent’s performance to avoid any potential knowledge gaps.


Set up intentional rotations

If agents skip specific tickets due to a lack of knowledge and you receive a fairly low volume about those topics, you can intentionally specialize your team to even out the workload and allow everyone to dig deep into that topic. 


Develop a Subject Matter Expert (SME) program 

Inside these programs, agents become certified experts in specific areas. Rather than avoiding complex tickets, agents are incentivized to handle them as part of their certification process.

You can pair this with a career path framework to tie it to their growth and development. 



Create buddy systems 

By pairing experienced agents with newer team members. The experienced agent reviews complex tickets their buddy handles, guiding them without taking over the ticket.


Other approaches to tackle the cultural and behavioral aspects include:


  • Offering gamification or rewards for equitable ticket handling and handling complex cases. Using complex tickets as a “ticket of the week” or as an example for folks to learn from is an easy way to build this engagement. 

  • Openly address the impact of cherry-picking. They may not be aware of how it impacts the others in the team or customers. They might even think it’s better to skip a ticket they’re unsure about so customers have a better experience. Create a culture where agents are happy to speak up when they don’t know something.

  • Adapt your management style or expectations. Agents typically start cherry-picking because they feel burnt out, are stressed about managing a specific volume, or don't feel comfortable asking for help when they need it. You can heavily influence these as a lead by changing how you review numbers or creating systems to encourage knowledge exchange. 


Tools to Avoid Cherry-picking in Zendesk


Zendesk is one of the most widely used ticketing systems in CX, and it offers many features to help minimize and stop cherry-picking.


For example, if you implement the “First In, First Out” approach mentioned above by using: 



Let’s say a VIP customer reaches out about an urgent issue in Spanish. Your skills could be set up to capture both the “VIP” status and “Spanish” so that it can be automatically routed to a Spanish-speaking agent who has the skill associated with “VIP” clients as well. 


Views 


Views are also an important part of effective prioritization and triage. It often helps to have multiple views for different scenarios such as above.


Using something like the Zendesk Merge Tickets App in views can help your agents save even more time as they don’t need to worry about picking up duplicate tickets and can instead focus on higher-value tasks. 


Merging tickets

Play mode


When views are set up effectively through proper triggers and routing, you can reduce cherry-picking even more by encouraging or even only allowing agents to grab tickets by using the Play Button in Zendesk.


This mode gives agents the first available ticket in their appropriate view, and then, when they are done, they are given the next one. 


Guided mode


A stricter version of the Play button is Guided mode, where agents are immediately given the first ticket in the view and have to provide an explanation for why they skip a ticket.


This heavily discourages cherry-picking, although it can be heavy-handed for some teams.


It might be especially effective as a temporary measure to identify which areas agents struggle with the most, so you can target these with workshops or other training methods. 


Round-robin assignment


While Zendesk doesn't have a native feature for this, there are a few apps you can configure to randomly assign a set number of tickets to your team members.


If your team has a wide range of tenure and specializations, round robin assignment is great to spread that knowledge equally across the whole team. 


Building a Cohesive Customer Experience


When you first encounter cherry-picking in customer service, addressing it can feel like a daunting task. If not handled, cherry-picking risks alienating your team, impacting your business’s bottom line, and creating unhappy customers. 


You don’t need to settle or let cherry-picking slide when you see it. Act quickly, set up the proper tooling, and develop a culture that’s more focused on helping customers than producing numbers.


If you’re looking for ways to level up your Zendesk instance, check out our suite of apps like Help Center Manager and Help Center Analytics



 



Mark

Mark Sherwood


Mark is an experienced customer experience leader and CX consultant specializing in developing CX teams and innovative CX strategies.

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