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Gamification Helps Boost Employee Engagement and Knowledge

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Gamification Helps Boost Employee Engagement and Knowledge

September 15, 2016

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By Tracey E. Schelmetic,
TMCnet Contributor
 


While every contact center needs to engage in agent training on a regular basis, not all contact center work is created equally. When the products and services sold are more technical – imagine a wireless company that sells many different models of phones as well as voice plans and data plans – the training, both initial and ongoing, becomes far more complex and workers need larger knowledge bases to be able to find the answers they need for customers’ questions.


In a telecommunications company, for example, there will be pools of knowledge. While some agents might be better versed with Apple (News - Alert) products, others might be experts on Android devices. Some agents will need to really understand the data plans inside and out, so when a customer asks, “How much data will I need if I want to stream video and music for a few hours each evening?” the agent can offer a reliable response. 

With a multi-skilled staff in the contact center, tasks such as knowledge sharing become more critical than ever. New agents may not have the knowledge that more veteran agents might have. An Android (News - Alert)-savvy agent may be at a loss to answer questions about iOS. In these complex environments, it’s important to a framework for workers to share knowledge. Some companies have found that gamification, or shaping intra-office communication to be more like video gaming, can help workers collaborate better.

In a recent blog post, NICE’s Adam Aftergut recounted how T-Mobile (News - Alert) used NICE’s social knowledge-sharing platform to boost collaboration.

“A knowledge-sharing platform only works if it is used, so T-Mobile incorporated gamification to enable problem solving and foster participation,” he wrote. “’Players’ earned points for using the system correctly and awards for contributing their own knowledge. The interactive platform drove both competition and collaboration between team members.”

The switch to a gamified knowledge sharing platform worked. After implementation, T-Mobile found that participation among employees in the knowledge-sharing platform increased by 96 percent, contributions by 583 percent and responses by 783 percent. In an industry with considerable employee disengagement – there’s a reason that employee turnovers in contact centers is high – these are impressive results. T-Mobile is not the first company to experience dramatic improvements in employee knowledge sharing with gamification, according to Aftergut.

“Gamification, when applied correctly, can increase engagement dramatically,” he wrote. “For example, researchers at Finland’s University of Tampere identified a positive link between reward badges and increased work activity, and Bunchball found that gamification increases engagement in 50 percent of employees targeted.”

It’s important to note that gamification isn’t just for employee collaboration. It can be used in training, simulations, sales, teaching organizational goals and methods to workers and many other areas. Performance and sales incentives can be tied to it, and – depending on how it’s designed – it can be used to foster either friendly competition among workers or collaborative teamwork. While it’s great for companies to have lofty goals and quality policies preserved in embossed lettering on their annual reports, they’re more likely to stick with employees when those workers can see how their performance ties into the goals on a daily basis. In other words, gamification can help answer the “What’s in it for me?” questions that, when answered properly, can drive employee engagement and performance.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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