A few IT technicians are creating tickets, assigning them to themselves, completing the work, and then submitting glowing responses to the follow-up satisfaction survey. For example, one technician opened an "updating inventory" ticket and rated the service as "excellent," praising the speed, proficiency, and communication. What's the best way to address this professionally, and should the ticketing system be configured to exclude self-created or self-assigned tickets from satisfaction metrics?
4 Answers
Handle the management issue directly: explain that technicians must not complete satisfaction surveys for tickets they created or worked themselves, document the instruction, and define consequences if it continues. The self-rating is misleading the reports, even if the original system design made it possible.
The bigger problem may be the metrics. If technicians are rewarded for ticket counts or perfect survey scores, they will eventually find ways to improve the numbers rather than the service. Separate self-created work from customer-facing tickets and make sure performance reviews consider resolution quality, complexity, and customer outcomes—not just ratings.
Run the reports both ways: once with self-submitted surveys included and once with them removed. Showing the difference makes it much easier to explain why the current metric is unreliable.
Fix the workflow instead of relying only on people to behave. Configure the survey trigger so it does not send when the requester and assigned technician are the same, or exclude those records from CSAT reporting. Internal work can also use a separate queue or ticket type that never generates a customer survey.
If the platform can’t suppress the survey, create an internal or service-account requester for staff-only tasks and report those tickets separately from genuine customer requests.
If these are harmless internal tickets and the surveys have no effect on evaluations, a lighthearted reminder may be enough. But if the responses influence KPIs, bonuses, staffing, or performance reviews, treat it as deliberate metric manipulation and address it consistently rather than ignoring it.
A simple team message can work: “Please don’t submit feedback on tickets where you are both the requester and the assignee. Those responses distort our customer metrics.”