How Gamification Helps Call Center Management

Let’s face it: keeping contact center agents engaged, fulfilled and employed at your organization can feel a bit like herding cats. Call center work is often highly transient, and workers often don’t find it particularly fulfilling. Unexpected call and contact volume spikes can leave agents feeling frazzled and burned out. Too many periods of stress can lead to high turnover. This doesn’t have to be the case, however: agents who are properly trained, regularly coached and effectively managed can find that it’s a job that suits them well. This creative management might involve some gamification.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the concept of introducing interactive, game-like principles and elements into an employee-facing solution such as contact center software (often workforce management or workforce optimization). Employees can perform tasks that allow them to ascend through the levels, earn badges or points, and gently compete with their coworkers. Everyone likes recognition for a job well done, and a gamified solution makes it easier for call center management. Its usefulness knows no bounds, according to Fonolo’s (News - Alert) Samantha Mehra in a blog post.

“By adding playful elements such as competition, rewards, and recognition into your call center, it can facilitate, recognize and reward learning, creativity, and social and personal growth,” she wrote. “A pat on the back and a paycheck every once in a while will only go so far, so adding game elements into your call center infrastructure is a possible way of keeping your team motivated and in the game.”

Benefits of Gamification

These are many, but include:

Faster onboarding. Training new agents is time-consuming, and gamification can help them learn the contact center’s solutions, processes and rules more quickly.

Self-correcting behavior. An agent who has access to real-time information about his or her performance will often strive to improve even without directions from managers.

Competition and recognition. Gamification is a great way for employees to attempt to come out on top when it comes to performance, and it’s an excellent framework to build a “job well done” recognition and reward system around, whether it’s simply employee of the month and a great parking spot, or bonuses in cash for gifts.

Better monitoring of the workforce. Gamification can helps call center managers identify the top performers (and the lowest performers) to better understand where to focus training, and what form the training should take.

More fun. Call center work is often challenging, tiring and dispiriting. By adding a bit of fun to the mix, managers can keep their agents more engaged, more responsive and more focused in customer support excellence.

Edited by Maurice Nagle