Cherry picking: What it is & how to prevent it in customer service

Cherry-picking is when agents handle more straightforward or appealing tasks, leaving challenging or less desirable ones for others. This may look like answering support tickets within their comfort level requires minimal effort. Consequently, customers with more complex problems experience delayed responses while other team members are burdened with picking up the slack.

In most conversation management platforms, including Khoros Service, the default setting for agents is that they have to select conversations from a queue and “pick them up” in order to manage and resolve them. There are many ways to filter the queue to prioritize the most important conversations, but agents typically have to choose which ones to engage — and in what order.

Support agents might cherry-pick for a couple of reasons. First and most obviously, they might select the most accessible conversations first to avoid dealing with more difficult inquiries. For example, an agent choosing between the topics “What's my order status” and “Will you help me process this return?” is incentivized to choose the former, as it requires less of them.

Another reason agents might cherry-pick is that specific conversation topics are more likely than others to boost their conversion rates or other KPIs. A customer asking for help placing an order suits an agent’s conversion rate; a customer complaining about a product defect might not.

If your support agents cherry-pick their queues, it can lead to frustrated customers, burnt-out team members, and poor customer service for your brand. Cherry-picking becomes dangerous when it’s used habitually—and this is exactly when you, the contact center manager, may need to step in. The practice can severely dampen an agent’s growth and risk giving the customer a false sense of neglect from the brand itself. 

You can think of training agents as similar to training an architect: you can’t expect them to construct magnificent buildings if they stick to only birdhouses. The agent may become an expert at quick, simple tasks, but you want their skills to grow, so when your customer asks for a skyscraper, they don’t present a birdhouse. Remember, at this moment, that agent is the brand ambassador. And it’s up to the managers to equip them with the right tools — including comprehensive customer service software to represent the brand as well as they can.

Though they are rare, there are times when cherry-picking can be beneficial: During ramp-ups, on highly technical requests, or during rest intervals. This can help agents avoid burnout, get help where they need it, and thus improve their overall quality of service. In short, you shouldn’t expect your agents to always take the most complex cases first because that’s not good for them, you, or your customers. But if someone is overindulging on cherry-picking, that's when it can cause problems. So how do you find the cherry-pickers on your team?

Being removed from the day-to-day support queues can make it challenging for managers to stay fully informed. However, certain customer experience metrics can help uncover patterns related to cherry-picking, providing valuable insights into agent behavior and task distribution.

Khoros Service comes equipped with various widgets to measure agent performance. These widgets are excellent ways to detect several potential issues in real-time, including cherry-picking.

Agents who cherry-pick might appear highly productive, closing many tickets compared to their peers. However, because they focus on easy, quick tasks and avoid complex issues, this high close rate can be misleading and indicate a potential problem within the team.

Whether agents are active within the agent dashboard can be an excellent indicator of whether they’re cherry-picking. If they're logging a lot of out-of-focus or inactive time, they may focus on a different window or tab with the agent console in the background. Check how long agents go without claiming a conversation, even though the queue is active with open requests. High numbers here show they might pass up complex requests to wait for easier ones.

Remember, though, not to take this statistic in a vacuum. An agent might not claim a new conversation simply because they are helping a customer with a complex, time-consuming task. So, measure how long they go without claiming a conversation and how long they go without any activity.

With the proper context, handle time can also be a warning sign for cherry-picking. An agent whose average handle time is far shorter than that of others may be intentionally selecting more accessible topics. An even better indicator is when an agent often opens conversations and closes them without engagement.

Track how many conversations your agents handle versus how many discussions they engage in. If these numbers are far apart, it can indicate that the agent is cherry-picking. Again, though, view this metric within the context of others, as it doesn’t always tell the whole story.

A cherry-picker will tend to close more tickets with a single reply since they favor simple, how-to questions or tasks that require minimal effort. So you can review this metric to help identify this behavior. You can compare each agent's percentage of one-reply ticket closures against the team average to spot any outliers.

Tracking how many conversations agents assign—and even more importantly, unassign—themselves can be an excellent predictor of cherry-picking. If an agent has assigned and then unassigned themselves from many conversations, they are likely cherry-picking.

That’s because agents might accept conversations without bias as they come through the queue, then “unassign” the ones they don’t want to handle. Maybe they’re more complex conversations or likely to end in negative feedback or sentiment.

Like all the other indicators, this one shouldn’t be taken in isolation. There are many legitimate, non-cherry-picking reasons an agent might unassign a conversation — they might realize, for example, that they cannot effectively serve that customer. So, always make sure to investigate other indicators of cherry-picking as well.

While this metric is not as straightforward for identifying cherry-picking, this can help you measure the average number of agent replies per ticket. Assuming more complex support problems entail more back-and-forth conversation; this metric can give you insight into any agents that consistently have lower touches per ticket. This indicates that an agent may be choosing more accessible tickets.

It’s important to note that these metrics should be used to start an investigation and do not independently pinpoint cherry-pickers. If you’re harboring suspicions from tracking these metrics, you’ll need to look into the agent’s replies to understand if one of your agents is truly cherry-picking.

Okay, so we’ve gone over how to identify cherry-picking. But how can you prevent it — or better yet, stop it before it starts — in your contact center? Brands most often employ one of two proven strategies.

This eliminates cherry-picking by simply hiding the conversation queue from agents. Instead of selecting a topic, the agent can claim (or be pushed) the next one in the queue. Since they no longer can choose issues, they can't cherry-pick. Still, use these options cautiously, as they can limit agent freedom in ways that harm the brand. Remember: Habitual cherry-picking is bad, but occasional cherry-picking can benefit agents and organizations.

Another way to prevent cherry-picking is to have managers monitor the queue daily to ensure difficult tickets don’t stay at the top. They can then contact support agents, asking them to pick up the specific ticket and be there if they need any extra help with the more difficult support ticket. You can make it a habit on your team to always pick up the oldest ticket in the queue, so delayed responses are a thing of the past.

Another (less extreme) strategy is incentivizing agents to handle challenging or longer conversations more often by monitoring sentiment conversion. With a pulse on the agents giving white glove service to complicated problems, you can quickly implement incentives for proactively picking up conversations with the most frustrated or dissatisfied customers. This is an excellent option because it preserves agent freedom and offers them an incentive for high-quality customer service.

Sometimes, agents cherry-pick because they may feel they don’t have the tools or resources to handle a problematic ticket. So, instead of expecting every agent to feel comfortable handling more challenging situations, establish a process where more experienced agents can be pulled into the conversations when needed. It can be as simple as tagging agents on their tickets or having the senior team member show the agent how to handle it so they can know for the next time.

To set your team up for success, it’s essential to have training opportunities, so they are equipped with the knowledge and tools they need to take on more complex tickets. You can host ongoing training sessions based on identified areas of opportunity. Specifically, look at areas where tickets are frequently skipped over or ask your team what they think their weakness is.

Preventing cherry-picking in customer service is crucial for your brand’s reputation and customer satisfaction. Implementing these strategies, alongside leveraging customer service software — like Khoros Service — with features such as intelligent routing, real-time monitoring, performance analytics, and automated workflows, can significantly mitigate cherry-picking issues.

The analytics view in Khoros Service displays multiple widgets with graphs offering real-time visibility into activity on your social media channels and your team's performance. You can filter the data according to time range, priority, and work queue. One handy metric in the analytics view is an agent’s responses per conservation, aiding in identifying cherry-picking behaviors. Monitoring how often an agent responds within a conversation can reveal the task’s difficulty level, as more manageable tasks typically require fewer responses.

To learn more about how our customer service software solution can help prevent cherry-picking, schedule a demo today.