If you have sports fans, or family of sports fans, working in your contact center, the biggest topic of conversation in your team this week will likely to be around the upcoming big game.
Every February, players run around a patch of grass in search of their ultimate reward. This end result is the culmination of dedicating their entire lives to the pursuit of a silver trophy that represents the hard work and dedication they have put into realizing their dream.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your contact center employees had the same amount of dedication and commitment to their goal as these professionals chasing an oblong swatch of pigskin? But it’s a little bit more difficult to motivate a contact center agent than it is to get a football player to chase around a quarterback.
As a result, many contact centers are turning to gaming science and psychology to increase agent productivity while reinforcing positive behaviors. This “gamification” incents and recognizes agents, motivating them to meet or exceed expectations by completing specific objectives and outpacing their peers.
The ultimate goal of gamification, however, is a customer-oriented one: to create superior experiences that result in more satisfied and longer-term customers while energizing agents and creating a sense of fulfillment.
Developing your first gamification program might seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. We find most contact centers launch inaugural gamification initiatives that feature one or more of these three key strategies:
And we can help you start. Calabrio queried several top Calabrio customers to get a few real-world ideas you can leverage in your own contact center, to make every day “game day.”
After the big game, one of the most exciting visuals is when the winning team lifts their trophy overhead. That trophy is valued not just because it’s made of precious metals, but because receiving it is a tangible recognition of their achievement and hard work.
Now, not every agent wants to go home with a giant trophy—but reward programs are a great way to motivate your agents. The key is to give agents rewards they actually want and recognize agents in ways that matter to them.
Here are a couple of tactics our customers use to recognize and reward their own agents:
Both new-hire onboarding and ongoing skills development are important programs for the modern contact center. Here is how a few Calabrio customers use gamification for both needs.
Skill Development Games:
Adding a (friendly) competition to your agents’ day can give them benchmarks to compete against and can make more boring tasks fun.
Peer competition also tap into agents’ competitive spirits by recognizing “winners” (top performers) and subtly motivating agents who are not near the top to try harder.
Here are some competitions that we’ve seen used successfully in the contact center:
Gamification can be a powerful motivational tool when done right and when combined with an effective training program can double the returns. Let the games begin!
Find out more about gamification with Calabrio. Read our whitepaper, Gamification: Getting started with a real-world strategy, to learn more.