Gamification in Contact Centers: Secret to Motivating Agents & Maximizing Productivity

Employees are motivated either internally or externally. 

Do you agree with this? 🧑 ❓

When you are motivated internally, you perform a job because you enjoy it and it makes you satisfied. But, when you are motivated externally, you engage in an activity because you receive an external reward.

Talking about office work, salary is external motivation. But it’s not enough to keep employees motivated in the long run.

Along with a competitive salary, employees need job satisfaction, enjoyment, team collaboration, competition, and a sense of purpose and meaning, which are internal motivation factors.

As in the case of contact centers, these forms of motivation play an important role in boosting contact center agent’s performance and productivity. 

Similarly, games also inspire motivation. For example, when you play a game, you enjoy it, and you receive rewards or points for completing a level or challenge.

So, basically, this is what gamification offers, it makes your work seem like a game. Providing your employees with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors, gamification makes the contact-center work fun, challenging, and a rewarding experience.

So, if you are looking for a way to motivate and encourage productivity in your agents, then you have to try gamification.

But, before you try to implement gamification in your contact center or workplace, you should know what gamification is and how it works.

What is Gamification?

In simple words, gamification refers to the process of gamifying something. You can gamify a task, or anything work-related.

Gamifying some things means adding game-like elements and features to a non-game-like environment. 

For example, coffee shops give a stamp for every purchase of a drink, and by completing up to 7 stamps, you get rewarded with a free drink.

Here, just like games, stamps are your points, and after achieving certain points, you are rewarded with a trophy, in this case, it’s a drink. 

The concept of points, level-ups, leaderboards, achievements, rewards,  constant feedback, and a community of players, which a game provides, are added to day-to-day business tasks/activities and you feel like you are playing a game instead of working. It sounds fun and it is. 

How Gamification Strategies Work For Businesses?

Let’s discuss real-life gamification strategies that businesses use.

You may have heard about the Apple Watch. This watch also gives feedback on how you are doing fitness-wise. 

This feedbacks are very helpful when it comes to improving yourself, in the long run. This is a kind of gamification scenario where you are given constant feedback when you are exercising, and which lets you connect more with the watch, this way, customers are more engaged with the watch. 

Ultimately, it leads to achieving more customer engagement and gives your business loyal customers.

Another game-like element is points or scores. The concept of points can be applied to a sales scenario. 

For example, a sales team member is required to meet a specified target number in a week. Whoever meets the target at first, gets a point. 

These points accumulate over time and scores are calculated. Whoever has the highest score, gets a bonus or a free lunch for a month. 

This strategy leads to more competition between the sales employees and each employee performs their best to win the competition. 

The top-performing employee will be at the top of the leaderboard. Every employee can analyze their performance based on their leaderboard rankings. And these activities achieve your business goals faster.

Why does gamification work so well in contact centers?

Some tasks are easier to gamify than others, specifically, jobs where performance metrics can be easily generated. 

Contact centers generate a lot of interaction data. This data can be analyzed and visualized using interaction analysis tools. 

The visualized data tell you about how your contact center employees are performing and how customers are experiencing. 

There are a lot of metrics for tracking contact center performance. But, we only need to track some KPIs( Key Performance Indicators) among the infinite list of contact center metrics. 

As an example, some of the KPIs for contact centers are Average Hold Time, Average Handle Time, Average Time To Answer, Average Abandonment Rate, and First Call Resolution.

Then, the KPIs of each contact center employee are measured and can be represented using percentages or scores. This gives real-time feedback to the employee.

Gamifying KPIs, adds a visual display of all the KPIs and a real-time feedback system.

Due to the nature of contact center work, many metrics can be compared and evaluated. Insights can be revealed by applying data science and analytics to these metrics and feedbacks can be given. Additionally, forecasts and predictions can also be made. 

Due to constant feedback, contact center employees will know where they are lacking, in terms of each Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Therefore, they can try to improve their performance based on feedback on different metrics.

Read Also:  Customer Feedback Management Best Practices

Employees who perform the best can be rewarded with meaningful rewards.

How to implement gamification in contact centers?

LeaderBoards, level-ups, points, meaningful rewards, badges or achievement emblems, scores, and feedback are the game mechanics used in gamification to encourage focus and motivate the player. 

Therefore, these game mechanics are applied to your contact center. How? 

There are two ways you can do this.  

Gamification using technology

In this technique, gamification software is used. Some also provide gamification add-ons to ERP systems. 

Gamification software creates your personal profile and you can see all of your progress on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, in a dashboard. 

For example, Leaderboards, provided by gamification software, is a digital visualization of where you stand within the community. 

Gamification Softwares can also compare your performance with respect to the whole community. By this, you will get an intrinsic motivation for self-improvement.

You can earn points for completing each task assigned to you by the contact center manager. After earning certain points, you can be rewarded with a raise or a badge. 

Badges are not necessarily for only the top players, there are certain criteria for earning badges, which gives average players a chance to showcase themselves and their unique skills. 

For example, contact center employees who perform better in some performance metrics than all of the other top performers, then, they can be awarded a badge for that specific metric.

Gamification without using technology

In this technique, gamification software is not used. Gamified experiences can be created without using technology or software. 

For this to work, you will need a pen and paper way to bring gamification to life. Whiteboards, flipcharts, pens, paper, handmade badges, telling fantasy stories, and anything that’s not digital can be used to insert gamified experience into your work.

For example, if you want to train a newcomer agent, in the contact center, about your product, then you can try to tell him/her a story that you created based on your product. It will create a fun learning experience. 

Or, you can encourage your contact center employees by rewarding them based on their level of performance. But, rewards have to be meaningful to the employee. 

How gamification benefits your contact center?

There are a number of ways in which gamification benefits your contact center experience.

Here are some of them below: 

Promotes Quick Learning

New employees can be given a gamified learning module to learn about the necessary job skills in a fun and interactive way. This makes learning more engaging and promotes quality and quick learning.

Promotes Self-Improvement

Gamification enables a constant feedback loop that constantly gives employees a sense of where they are and what they need to improve to get to the top of their game. So, they will be more focused on improving themselves.

Promote healthy competition

By leaderboards ranking, by comparing yourself with the community of other employees. 

Motivates Remote Contact Center Employees

It can also motivate and encourage focus in remote contact center teams.

Creates job satisfaction

Job satisfaction is achieved when you enjoy doing work. Guess what? That’s what gamification brings by making your work more fun and enjoyable.

Boosts Productivity

For achieving recognition and the top position in the game, employees try their best to work as per business goals.

Promotes Team Collaboration and creates a sense of community

By working together as a team to solve issues or by connecting with the community, employees can bond together faster and it encourages more understanding and cooperation between the employees. This leads to fewer communication gaps and faster problem-solving.

In Bottom Line

Gamification is a growing trend for businesses across the globe. It plays a vital role in increasing employee engagement and productivity. 

Today’s age is surrounded by young people and technology. Young employees prefer to learn visually rather than being told how to do something. 

Gamification in contact centers or workplace helps you train young employees visually and interactively. So, it supports employees no matter what their ages are. 

By the way, if you are looking to implement a contact center solution into your business, you should try KrispCall. Without a contact center, you will be missing a huge communication opportunity between you and your clients. 

Arun Chaudhary

Arun is SEO Analyst at KrispCall. He has written in extensively in the field of cloud telephony and call center solutions.