3 min
“Gamification” was born in the digital media industry in 2008. Initially it was used in the education sector where teachers sought to make learning fun for their students. It was a tool that favored both students and teachers, since what was achieved was to enrich teaching and improve academic results. It is currently in companies where this strategy of making work compatible with fun is being implemented. Of course, in the call centers too.
The final goal of the gamification is to offer a superior experience for the customer that results in more satisfied and more loyal customers, but the way it does it is through the participation of agents that take advantage of the science and the psychology of the game to increase the productivity of the agents while reinforcing the positive behaviors.
How? By motivating agents to meet or exceed expectations and by completing specific objectives and outperform their peers.
Gamification, one of the best ways to involve agents, also helps contact center leaders measure and manage agent performance more easily, which naturally improves due to the continuous effect of gamification.
Four Ways In Which Gamification Can Be Promoted In Call Centers:
1) Connect The Gamification With The Corporate Objectives
Each call center must adapt its gamification strategies and tactics to the unique objectives and needs of its business. For example, a company trying to reduce costs can make the reduction of call time part of their program, while a company that wants to improve the performance of agents could include in their program the “ratings of customer satisfaction. “
2) Use Gamification To Encourage Competition And Collaboration
Peer-to-peer competition, a natural component of any gamification strategy, takes advantage of the competitive nature of agents by recognizing those who perform better. For this reason, most gamification programs incorporate some kind of “classification table”: a control panel that shows the best results and their “scores” compared to the key metrics established as their objectives. Agents actively monitor the leaderboard to see who is leading the group, who is recovering, who is lagging behind, etc. And supervisors supervise the classification table to identify agents who may need more training.
Also, gamification can be used to foster collaboration between agents. To encourage active peer mentoring, where agents ask each other questions and exchange advice, you could even design a gamification program where agents advance to higher levels when they help other agents broaden their knowledge and refine the desired skills.
3) Make Gamification Meaningful
In order for the gamification program to be as successful as possible, the “prizes” used as incentives must be significant for its agents. To do this, agents should be asked what kind of awards they value and then include them in their gamification efforts. Some examples include restaurant gift cards, Amazon Prime memberships, more influence over their schedules, and preference over the types of inquiries, a premium parking spot for the month or an additional vacation day.
Some organizations establish a complete incentive structure to engage their agents, with cash rewards granted to agents that maintain a greater number of adhesions, productivity numbers and quality scores.
4) Use The Concepts Of Gamification To Motivate Agents
In addition to the classification tables, a common and effective way in which contact centers motivate agents to recognize the best employees is through the use of the gamification concept of “badges”.
Like the badges used to denote the player’s status in online games, badges used in call center gamification track and measure agent status: different styles or colors of badges mean different achievements, with increasingly complex badges as the agents advance to higher levels.
Badge dashboards help agents track their individual performance statistics and know the badges they have won and the ones they have not yet achieved. As an added bonus, badges help supervisors quickly; visually monitor agent performance metrics and progress against objectives.
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