This article originally appeared in the Jan. 2012 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions

How do you engage call center workers and get them to give the job their all? The answer, according to Arcaris, is to make work like a game.

The company’s SaaS (News - Alert)-based call center solution, Playcall, does this by using game dynamics to allow customer contact center managers and reps to track their performance and the performance of their peers on leaderboards, and to create and view achievement boards, says Oscar Giraldo, Arcaris founder and CEO.

“It’s like a mission,” says Ariel Cordiviola, chief product officer of Arcaris.

The Arcaris service also offers a platform through which call center managers and other business leaders can rewards badges to outstanding workers and send warnings to those who are not meeting expectations.

The company, which started out about a year and a half ago in Chile with a click-to-call platform, recently moved to Silicon Valley and introduced this social call center contact service to select customers. The company in December told CIS magazine that it was looking for some customers in the U.S. to prove out the success of the new platform.

Giraldo and Cordiviola believe that these types of services and concepts are the wave of the future. And they say they’re not alone in this thinking, pointing to a recent article in which Facebook (News - Alert) CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as commenting: "We think every industry is going to get fundamentally rethought and redesigned around people. There is an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it.

"It can't be some lightweight layer, built on top of something else," Zuckerberg continued. "The companies and services that are built from the ground up to be social will have an advantage."