You manage engineering for a B2B mobile measurement and attribution platform that recently changed a client-facing support process: high-priority onboarding and troubleshooting requests now go through a structured intake form and tiered triage instead of direct assignment to a solutions engineer. Four weeks after launch, median first-response time improved from 6 hours to 2.5 hours and tickets handled per engineer rose 18%, but enterprise client CSAT moved only from 4.2 to 4.1 and 30-day issue reopen rate increased from 9% to 14%. Leadership wants to know whether the process is genuinely improving customer outcomes or just making operational metrics look better.
How would you assess whether this process change is actually improving outcomes for clients, and how would you distinguish real customer value from metric movement caused by faster but lower-quality handling or changes in ticket mix?