I am in a position where two of my co-workers may be engaging in intentional negligent behavior, but it could also be a misunderstanding on my end. I want to approach one of them about it before alerting management.
The two involved will be referred to as Samuel and Oliver. They are good friends with each other, and we all share the same position. Oliver and I work in the same department. Samuel works in a different department. We are top-tier remote technical support, paid per issue we resolve. None of us have authority over the other. We handle escalated problems and have a responsibility to keep our department's response times low.
Samuel will assign escalated issues in my department to Oliver 99% of the time, but he does so within policy. Oliver tends to have issues sit for long periods of time (1 - 3 days) without responses because he has taken off for the day, also within policy. I, on the other hand, respond to issues within 1 - 2 hours. I typically end up responding to the issue anyway, since once the issue is old enough we can take ownership of it from someone else.
I believe Samuel is assigning issues to Oliver just because they are friends. Perhaps trying to help him make extra cash. I normally wouldn't care, but Oliver's slow responses hurt our monthly reports.
Then again, Samuel may not even know that Oliver consistently takes days off. My suspicions may be entirely unfounded.
Before approaching management with my thoughts, I want to tell Samuel that assigning issues to me would be the better option since I can respond to the client faster.
How do I express this to Samuel without essentially saying "I do this job better than your friend"?