I help manage a team of 5 remote customer support agents. One of them is doing great, but the other 4 are only taking easy tickets and skipping the more complex ones. They have all worked here for over a year and have access to dozens of template responses to assist in replying to tickets, so there is really no excuse for this behaviour.

So far we have tried the following, with little success:

Given them additional training and made sure that there is always a manager available to provide assistance if they ask for help (they rarely ask though) Incentivised taking more complex tickets by paying 50% more for them Warned them that they are not to skip tickets and violations of this policy may result in suspension (this kind of worked for a couple weeks but then they reverted to old habits)

If it were just one agent doing this I would fire them, but obviously we can’t fire 80% of our team.

I understand that it can be somewhat exhausting to handle 50+ tickets each day and it is temping to focus on the low-hanging fruit. But this is causing issues for our business. Some clients aren’t getting an answer for 4 days when they are supposed to be replied to within 24 hours.

Any advice would be appreciated.