I read a fascinating take recently in this Substack article: “We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t. We want to build good products, but we don’t know how to do that, so we optimize for engagement. We want to teach kids how to read and write, but we don’t know how to do that, so we optimize for test scores.”

In economics and social science, this reality is known as Goodhart’s Law.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Once you turn a metric into a goal, people change their behavior to hit that specific number. They game the system to survive, even if their actions completely undermine the original purpose of the business.

It’s how you get the Cobra Effect.

The term originates from an old story about a government offering a financial bounty for dead cobras to solve an infestation. Entrepreneurial citizens responded by breeding cobras in their basements to collect the reward. The incentive made the problem worse.

In customer success, the exact same distortion occurs every day. Evaluated strictly on average handle time, a support agent may simply hang up on a frustrated customer to protect their quota, sacrificing service quality to maintain a clean statistic.

Most customer success metrics fail because they track outputs rather than outcomes.

Outputs are the activities your team performs. Outcomes are the actual business results. Outputs are easy to fake. Outcomes are not.

If you measure your CSMs on the number of quarterly business reviews they log, you’ll get a high volume of calendar invites. You will probably not get higher retention. You end up with your team prioritizing the checkbox over the customer relationship.

To build a measurement framework that resists manipulation, you must pair your metrics. Never track a quantity metric without a balancing quality metric.

If you measure speed, pair it with precision. Track average handle time alongside first-contact resolution. If your team games the speed metric, they’ll break the resolution score. The scorecard forces a balanced approach.

True outcome measures for a software business must focus on value realized, customer behavior, and structural portfolio health. They reject engineering velocity and activity logging.

A robust framework tracks value outcomes like time-to-value. You measure exactly how many days it takes a new customer to complete their first meaningful action inside the platform. If a customer stalls before reaching that initial milestone, their churn risk at renewal spikes.

On the financial side, leaders look past aggregate satisfaction and focus on Net Revenue Retention and customer acquisition cost payback periods. These metrics connect the health of the customer base directly to the bottom line of the enterprise.

For relationship and sentiment tracking, successful teams swap generic popularity surveys for the Customer Effort Score. They ask one behavioral question: Did the company make it easy to resolve the issue?

When metrics dictate bonuses, promotions, or terminations, gaming the system becomes an institutional survival mechanism.

Metrics should exist as diagnostic tools to uncover bottlenecks and spark strategic conversations. They should serve as indicators for investigation, not tools for absolute employee control.

Take a look at your internal dashboard this week.

Are you incentivizing your team to breed cobras? Are you tracking the number of emails your CSMs send while ignoring whether your customers are actually adopting your core features?

If your staff changes their workflow in strange ways just to hit a monthly target, it’s time to retire the metric.

Stop managing the spreadsheet. Start measuring the outcome.

What target are your CSMs gaming right now?

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