A support lead showed us a dashboard that had gone green. Median time to close was down. Then we opened five closed tickets. In three of them the customer had written back after the close, asking the same question in different words. The metric had recorded the agent's last click. It had not recorded the outcome.
The team was not lazy. The tool rewarded the click.
done is a state the customer can see
Write down what finished means for this kind of work, in the customer's terms. The refund landed. The access works. The answer matches the question they asked, not a neighboring one. If you cannot point at that, you have a status, not a result.
The screen that matters is the one after the suggested reply: did this resolve it, and if not, who has it now. Closing should be slightly harder than sending.
A green dashboard can be a record of people giving up in an orderly way.
read the tickets that came back
Once a week, read the ones that reopened. Not a sample from the model. The actual thread. The pattern is usually boring and specific: we answered a different question, we asked them to repeat themselves, we closed because the policy was unclear and the button was not.
Fix that screen. The time-to-close chart will get worse for a week. The work will get finished.