Churning - a term normally associated with the securities industry, refers to repeated sales to generate commissions.
Melissa is trying to deal with something a lot of us have been dealing with for a long time, the churning of help desk tickets. This is something that I’m use to, but I never came up with a term for it, until last night. The term churning seems to fit perfectly. It is usually used to describe illegal practices that can occur in brokerage houses or insurance companies. Basically, the idea is to create repeated sales in order to create commissions. Since most IT help desks have some service level agreement (could be in house or out sourced help desks), and these agreements are tied to some sort of bonus program based on how fast the tickets are closed, they do what they can to close a ticket as soon as possible (even if that means closing a ticket that hasn’t been resolved). Then when the customer calls up complaining that the problem was solved, what do they do, but open another ticket, which means more money for them since it looks like they are doing more work. The powers that be only see the reports that state how many tickets were issued in a given time period, and how long they took to be resoled. So help desk management does their best to manipulate the data to generate more money. The morale of the story: if you want to make sure that you really get help when you call a help desk, make sure they don’t close the ticket before your problem is resolved. If they do close it, don’t let them create another one, make them re-open it (which usually means you will have to speak to someone in a management role). Otherwise you are just encouraging the help desk not to help you.