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Using Gamification to Build More Engaged Contact Center Employees
Workforce Optimization Featured Article

Using Gamification to Build More Engaged Contact Center Employees

 
November 07, 2013

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By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
 

In the ongoing effort to provide customer engagement – the true goal of most successful contact centers today – companies often skip a step: attaining employee engagement. Customer engagement cannot be a viable goal for any company until it has succeeded in attaining employee engagement first. Disinterested, apathetic contact center agents will never inspire loyalty or leave customers with a warm, fuzzy feeling that their business is valued and that they truly are important to the organization.


What this means is that long before the process of customer engagement starts, contact centers must first build a program that turns new hires into a professional force of frontline ambassadors for the company. While there are many ways to do this – hire the right people, train extensively, pay them well and offer them a pleasant working environment – many companies have found success in new motivation techniques. A big part of this is gamification.


Image via Shutterstock

Gamification refers to the practice of using video game concepts and mechanics to develop business solutions in an effort to make them more interactive, more engaging and simply more fun. In the contact center, solutions that have been “gamified” borrow concepts from video games, such as having users progress through levels, using achievement badges, allowing users to earn game currency they can use to exchange for virtual or real items, allowing challenges between users, and using progress bars and leader boards to represent visual progress in statuses or a competition.

It’s a particularly effective method of training and motivation for younger employees, who tend to populate contact centers these days. The process is two-fold: It not only helps agents grasp new concepts and pick up new skills, it’s also a way to reward agents who put extra effort into their work.

In a recent article for Destination CRM, Anna Convery, executive VP of strategy for desktop automation and analytics company OpenSpan (News - Alert), notes that gaming is in younger employees’ DNA. She provides examples of companies where it has worked well to boost both training and sales efforts.

“One telecommunications provider uses gamification to reward agents based on the number of ‘bundled’ or ‘triple play’ (voice, data, and wireless services) transactions the agent makes in a week,” writes Convery. “Using their agile agent desktop (the service desktop with all critical sales and service functions in a single view), agents are presented with their triple play ‘scores’ in real time. This telecommunications company uses 25 triple plays as the goal metric, so once the agent hits that 25th triple play, he or she wins a $50 gift card. This technique has helped this company boost triple play sales by 18 percent in the first three months of the program.”

Gamification strategies can also be used to reward agents who achieve work with no errors, those who upsell or cross-sell customers, or those who stick to preset performance metrics or meet any other goal or metric the contact center might measure. By putting some interest and some motivation to self-improve into the contact center agent’s day, companies can build better, engaged employees who are necessary to the process of building engaged customers.




Edited by Blaise McNamee

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