Imagine a workplace where employees engage in healthy competition, fueling motivation and driving towards business goals. This synergistic force fosters positive relationships, skill development, and effortless performance tracking by managers.
This is the edge gamification offer for organizations. As explained in Gartner's Gamify, gamification creates captivating experiences, resonating with employees emotionally and inspiring them to achieve objectives aligned with their organization's vision.
In the context of contact centers, where agents often face complex workloads and demanding customers, gamification becomes paramount. It can serve as a driving force to deliver exceptional customer experiences and thrive in a harmonious workplace.
How can you ensure the success of your contact center gamification strategy ? In this blog post, we will address all your pressing questions and provide comprehensive guidance to effectively shape your strategy.
Contact Center Gamification: Definitions and Benefits
Firstly, let's examine what contact center gamification entails. As mentioned by Deloitte, contact center gamification refers to the application of game elements and mechanics to non-game contexts, including agent workflows, training, collaboration, and
This incentivized approach transforms contact center KPIs and activities into interactive games that often extend throughout the entire company. These games can feature goals, points, rewards, leaderboards, and rankings.
Contact center gamification brings benefits to both agents and customers in various ways, including:
- Increasing engagement and productivity by introducing competition, challenges, and a sense of achievement into agents' workflows
- Creating a positive company culture to foster teamwork and cooperation
- Turning training into an enjoyable process that offers ongoing support and reinforcement to facilitate continuous learning and development
- Keeping talented contact center agents on board by providing them with a more appealing and innovative work environment
According to research conducted by Zippia on gamification trends, organizations that effectively utilize gamification techniques achieve seven times more profit compared to others.
The same study also revealed that when appropriate gaming elements are incorporated into their workflows, 90% of employees become more productive. So the true challenge lies not in implementing a contact center gamification solution, but in establishing it appropriately to avoid potential pitfalls.
From Promise to Reality: Applying Gamification Strategies in the Right Way
Before planning strategies to enhance agent productivity through gamification, organizations must first evaluate their existing contact center teams and operations. This step is essential because, without proper planning and implementation, gamification can go wrong.
Gartner has predicted that 80% of gamified applications will fail to achieve their intended business objectives, primarily due to inadequate design. The ongoing discussions regarding the effectiveness of gamification in motivating contact center agents highlight the fact that not all companies have fully grasped this strategy.
Organizations aiming to empower their contact center operations with gamification tools and practices must begin by assembling a highly skilled team of contact center professionals.
Then, these organizations can evaluate operations and processes to identify the technical requirements of a successful implementation of gamification.
If the team members and operations are not receptive to these changes, gamification can create a negative environment where team members are unmotivated and anxious about hitting their targets.
So if you want to create a gamified experience for your contact center agents and achieve your goals, it is best to take a holistic approach to your operations and enhance them with technical and methodological improvements.
Let’s Supercharge Your Operations With a 360° CX Optimization Approach That Extends Beyond Contact Center Services
4 Gamification Strategies to Boost Agent Productivity
There are several approaches to implementing gamification best practices. Organizations have the option to either use gamification software applications developed internally or select tools that align with their specific business objectives.
Regardless of whether they opt for an external gamification tool or develop their software in-house, certain strategies have proven to be particularly effective in improving the performance and motivation of contact center agents.
Let's take an in-depth look at these game-changing strategies that can empower your approach to contact center management.
1. Motivating Agents With Performance Metrics
Many contact centers already use tools to manage and monitor agent KPIs, such as quality scores and schedule adherence. Solely monitoring these metrics without gamification can create more pressure on team members instead of enhancing their engagement.
To truly gamify performance, organizations should focus on finding ways to motivate and inspire teams to achieve their goals.
For example, implementing leaderboards for specific KPIs can encourage friendly competition among employees. However, it's essential to be cautious about using real-time leaderboards to avoid agents feeling overwhelmed or stressed.
2. Encouraging Teamwork With Gamification
Implementing gamification can contribute to cultivating a positive company culture while avoiding unhealthy competition that may negatively impact agent morale and performance.
Introduce team-based games that encourage agents to collaborate in task completion or achieving objectives. You can also set team challenges to improve key metrics, like average handle times, first-call resolution rates, and satisfaction scores.
Assigning buddies or mentors to your agents can also be a beneficial method to empower them to share their skills and knowledge. The key to gamifying collaboration lies in fostering a sense of community that enhances agent engagement, loyalty, and overall satisfaction.
3. Providing a Gamified Learning Experience
Employee training consumes a significant portion of team members' time, as it is crucial to onboarding new agents and providing ongoing training as the organization evolves.
According to McKinsey & Company, only 29% of contact center agents express satisfaction with their training and development opportunities. To address this challenge, organizations can introduce an element of enjoyment and effectiveness into agent training by incorporating game mechanics into the learning process.
Consider integrating enjoyable quizzes, badges, and progress bars to assess your agents' alignment with training objectives. Additionally, you can offer small incentives such as in-office recognition or profile stars upon completion of training sessions.
4. Reward Well-Managed Customer Interactions
Forbes recognizes contact center agents as modern-day heroes, and they’re right. Interacting with customers can be a challenging task, often involving demanding customers and complex inquiries.
Providing incentives to team members who effectively handle difficult queries is a fantastic approach to refuel their sense of purpose after each successful interaction.
Consider rewarding agents for receiving positive reviews, tackling challenging queries, and achieving high satisfaction scores. This not only acknowledges their efforts but also motivates them to continue delivering exceptional customer service.
Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves for a Better Experience
It is evident that regardless of your strategy, the key to delivering an exceptional experience for both customers and agents lies in adopting a 360° perspective on customer experience optimization.
As one of the leading BPO providers in Europe, our goal is to assist our partners in redefining the ultimate experience through a range of CX optimization solutions, technologies, and consulting services.
The Mplus methodology propels organizations to new heights by analyzing their CX requirements and identifying the most talented contact center professionals, customized platforms, and cutting-edge CX technology solutions.
Together, we can elevate your business beyond the boundaries of contact center service and streamline all your operations to ensure the success of your gamification strategy.
If you are intrigued and want to learn more about Mplus solutions and services, feel free to reach out to us at any time!
