Avoiding Cherry-Picking in the Support Queue

In Ask Help Scout, long-time customer service professional Mat “Patto” Patterson answers readers' most challenging customer support delivery, leadership, and career questions.

Well all right, by "cherry-picking," we’re really talking about customer service folks browsing a busy support inbox and picking out the conversations that are simpler or faster for them to resolve.

Customers with more complex, unclear, or tricky questions are left languishing in the queue like Brussels sprouts at the budget buffet. It's a poor customer experience, and the older those questions get, the less appealing they look to the support team.

As you mention, having every conversation automatically routed to a support person does remove the cherry-picking aspect, but it can feel heavy handed — it's enforcement, not encouragement.

I think you’re looking for a way to minimize the problem while holding onto those small team strengths of flexibility and personality. I have two ideas for you.

The first is to reduce opportunities for cherry-picking. Automatically assigning every conversation, whether by round-robin, capacity, or other system, will certainly remove the time lost to browsing the queue.

You don’t have to go that far, though. There are many other ways to reduce the need to browse the queue. The skills-based routing you’re looking at is one. Another is assigning some people to answer the oldest questions first and others the newest, rotating folks through those roles for variety. Personally, my ownership over the toughest questions came from being a solo support agent with no other option. You might try creating a version of that experience by categorizing incoming support questions using tags or workflows and assigning folks to own sub-queues based on those categories.

My second suggestion is to find ways to encourage your team to challenge themselves. I am certain you already have a supportive work environment, but I bet there are some tweaks you can make to encourage that sense of ownership. It helps to know that cherry-picking is often less about taking the easy conversations and more about avoiding the difficult ones.

I’ve got three suggestions to help your support team make the harder choice. First, consider how they are being measured. Is their work success mostly about the speed and volume of conversations they handle? Could you measure their skill development and willingness to engage, too?

Second, encourage knowledge sharing. Newer people may not yet be confident enough to answer complex questions, but they want to learn. Use something like Help Scout's "follow" feature so they can watch how the experienced team members answer (and reward them for teaching their colleagues.)

Finally, add in some incentives for taking ownership. For example, imagine if your team could rise up tiers by proving they had been successful with certain types of complex cases? Or if you celebrated those people already taking the harder cases with some public praise or perhaps a custom bobble head doll depicting them as a queue gardener? Two good options right there.

I know you will pick the right combination of changes and greatly reduce any cherry-picking without needing to become Sarah Iron-Fist, Destroyer of Cherries.

Keep serving those customers,

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