Call Center Gamification – How Do You Get Your Contact Center Agents to Punch Above Their Weights While Working From Home?

Contact center agents today are the most isolated lot. A few years ago, call centers were buzzing around with activities, and all of a sudden, the pandemic struck, and agents moved to their homes.

Agents had to deal with demanding customers with little immediate access to support. The impact on the agents spending time away from office or operational hub, working as a part of remote or hybrid teams, are tremendous. According to a survey, many of them have considered leaving their jobs.

What is Call Center Gamification?

With many agents still at home for at least a part of the week, how do you keep them motivated and continue to delight your customers?

Call center gamification is one of the powerful tools to help increase agent involvement in any change and reduce the risk of customer churn and absenteeism. Gamification will improve the level of performance of agents and generate better results. This idea is created to have healthy competition among agents and reward good performance.

Who doesn’t like a good, friendly game that boosts moods and exercises healthy competition?

That’s what gamification does in a contact center. It strategically enhances the daily workflow of agents and generates better results.

Need for Gamification in the Workplace

Gamification can make your call center a fun place for your agents, motivate them to improve their performance, and be seen more positively by their peers and managers. All the gamification will be structured towards progressing the organization’s goals as well.

This would create happier workplaces leading to happier employees, and it often leads to happier customers, which can lead to higher customer relationships, retention rates, and increased customer lifetime value.

Call Center Gamification Example

In one of our engagements, gamification helped agents to collaborate in generating the most accurate reports and overall customer satisfaction rates. The reports focused on customer-specific information, for which multiple teams had to contribute data points, which led to a much happier customer and satisfied customer.

The entire team felt happy about their contributions and involvement in helping the customer with the most accurate and relevant reports while progressing the organization’s goals. This was organized as a contest, and the top three teams were rewarded. This helped in collaboration tremendously across remote teams, and it has become a practice for the contact center to generate customer-specific reports. 

Call Center Gamification Ideas

Here are some call center gamification ideas

• Ensure that the gamification activities are linked to your business’s goals and KPIs.
• Set achievable goals – be it individual or team goals
• Please don’t keep it as a one-time activity, and keep it going continuously. Offer constant feedback to the team members on the progress – rankings, points, and positions
• Offer frequent prizes and rewards to maintain the interest of agents and the teams
• The games can be fun, interactive, and engaging.
• Visually show agents how close they are to reaching a goal.
• Encourage agents to resolve issues in a set timeframe.
• Integrate a feature where peers can commend or recognize each other.

Overall, Gamification Will Help:

• Create a healthy competition between call center agents
• Encourage agents to go the extra mile and be more productive at work
• Track performance progress
• Create team collaboration and unity
• Help agents feel valued and appreciated for their accomplishments
• Allows immediate feedback through scores, leaderboards, and badges.
• Increases loyalty and reduces churn rates.
• Break down larger objectives into manageable challenges.
• Provides valuable insights on user behaviors and preferences.

The job of a call center agent is not easy, and more so during the pandemic. Many agents have felt isolated and disconnected from their colleagues. A large number of agents may also have had to deal with stress and demanding customers. While the pandemic is not in your control, helping your agents think a part of the organization is in your control.  

Gamification can play a massive role in creating a positive impact in advancing your organization’s goals and increasing agent engagement and morale. We believe that more and more contact centers would adopt gamification as a part of their ongoing training and operations.

Happy workplace. Happy employees. Happy customers.