Gamification In Call Centers: 10 Fail-Proof Tips To Get You Started

Updated on August 22, 2022

Keeping call center employees motivated is crucial if, as an employer, you want them to be productive and satisfied with their job. After all, the customer service experience that you provide relies mainly on your call agents, so anything you do to keep their spirits up will be beneficial to your company. One of the best tools for accomplishing all this is Gamification, which in recent years has become massively popular.

In the Call Center world, Gamification is used to introduce game-like processes to motivate, assess, and reward employees based on their performance while ensuring their satisfaction and improving your workplace culture. Regardless of how you look at it, it’s a win, because your employees will have more reasons to stay and help you reach your business goals.

But if you’re unsure where to begin, don’t worry – in the following paragraphs, you’ll learn what it means to Gamify a call center, but also the reasons why it can be the best possible solution to your business problems.

By Gamifying your call center, you can significantly elevate your key performance indicators (KPIs) and boost employee morale to drive retention. It is a well-known fact that call center employees don’t normally stay at the job for too long due to the levels of stress associated with handling difficult customers and other factors, such as low levels of engagement and motivation.

Due to the cost associated with replacing valuable call agents, everyone who quits because their job doesn’t give them meaning and engagement will hurt your growth. And if you’re thinking of Gamifying but you’re unsure if you’d be able to find the budget to do it, just consider how much it’s costing you to lose and replace employees by calculating your turnover rate.

To calculate your turnover rate, take all the employees who quit in a year and divide it by your average number of employees. After that, divide the number by 12 to see your monthly average. Every person that leaves equates a new person to onboard and spends time training, so if by Gamifying your business you can stop even one agent from quitting, it should offset the cost of any rewards you might provide for your current agents.

Gamification is a fail-proof way to improve employee motivation because it gives them meaning and something to strive for while putting a smile on their faces. Always keep in mind that the happiest employees are the ones that perform best and stay the longest.

All that aside, there are some Gamification ideas that you can incorporate into your call center business to keep your employees and customers happy.

1. Measuring Employee Performance Through Gamification

Gamification can do wonders in assessing individual performance. When it comes to tracking employee progress, call center businesses can calculate the average handling time and first contact resolution rates. As call agents aim to complete their tasks, managers can evaluate their productivity levels to understand what works and what doesn’t. Agents who meet or exceed expectations may then be rewarded for their achievements.

2. Use Exciting Daily Rewards To Improve KPIs

One of the easiest ways to Gamify a call center is to introduce daily rewards. Simply choose a KPI you’d like to improve and reward the best employees with small prizes every day – this can be anything from food vouchers to extra breaks. Alternatively, you can introduce a point system where your agents can earn points for completing specific tasks to “buy” larger prizes.

Point systems can serve as a tool to ensure employee engagement while they strive to win bigger and better prizes. However, some extra work is required when setting up prize tiers. If that’s too much of a hassle, food vouchers and extra breaks will also do the job.

3. Reward Creativity

The goal of Gamifying your call center is to encourage employees while also getting precious new business improvement ideas from them. By making your agents feel appreciated, you’ll inspire them to think of and share new ideas that can help your company thrive. This is how you create a healthy, fun, and most of all productive work environment.

4. Encourage Friendly Competition

Gamification can help employees awaken their thirst for competition while helping them become more engaged and motivated to improve their skills. To make things even more exciting, you can introduce leaderboards for call agents to keep track of their scores and ranking within their team. This can do wonders for productivity in the workplace.

5. Create A Charity Fundraiser

Just as other companies do, Call Center businesses also find meaning and value in taking part in important social causes.

Give your call agents the chance to vote on a charity they would like to contribute to. Afterward, tell them about the details determining how much financial aid goes to the charity.

When a team reaches a specific goal, the business can donate the chosen amount and help make the world a better place.

It’s a win-win situation from which even the teams who’ve placed last can feel a sense of pride for contributing to a worthy cause. It also helps everyone understand the importance of solid teamwork.

6. Make Training Sessions More Enjoyable

Education is always much more impactful when it’s also enjoyable. What you could do to make learning more entertaining is turn training sessions into fun games that test employee skills. Using Gamification in training sessions is a great way to ensure employee engagement and motivate them to get better at what they do.

7. Encourage Remote Agents

Every employee needs to be encouraged from time to time to be able to function at their best. And this also holds for agents who work from home (they also happen to have a higher retention rate than on-site employees).

However, making remote workers feel immersed in the company culture can be a difficult task. Thankfully, Gamification has the power to motivate employees and keep their levels of engagement high by providing an environment of friendly and healthy competition.

No matter where an employee is located, Gamification offers an engaging environment so that they can also feel part of something special.

8. Play Some Call Center Bingo

Everybody loves a game of good old Bingo!

In a Call Center environment, the game can be played in the following way:

Each agent gets a Bingo card, instead of numbers, which will contain goals like – “Get a lead” or “Talk with 5 customers whose number ends with 7”. The person who completes all the tasks on their card receives a gift. A fun game of Bingo helps agents keep track of their daily tasks while also rewarding them for their hard work.

The goals can be modified according to the company’s needs.

9. Minimize On-Boarding Time

By using Gamification, you can get immediate feedback about how quickly employees catch on to do a good job. So, if your company needs one month of onboarding to assess an employee’s performance, through Gamification, you can get their performance data in short intervals of time to minimize on-boarding time.

10. Discuss Best Practices

After a day, week, or month of fun and games, spend some time talking with your agents about their experiences and the lessons they’ve learned. Invite them to share their knowledge and ask them about their opinion on how Gamification practices can be improved.

Gamification brings joy, energy, and focus to the work environment and gives employees the confidence and motivation they need to provide a better service and increase company revenue. The more satisfied your agents feel with the work environment, the more successful your company will be.

The way you incorporate Gamification into your workplace will ultimately determine the results you will get. Your main objective should always be to engage employees and give them reasons why they should work at their maximum and push the boundaries of their potential.

You must never allow the emergence of an overly-competitive environment as it can drain your employees and cause burnout, which will inevitably lead to negative results in the workplace.

When implementing Gamification into a Call Center, it must be ensured that not only the end goal is rewarded, but also the small achievements along the way. Otherwise, employees might start feeling discouraged. After all, why would someone play a game in which they hardly ever win? It’s also crucial that it’s not the top 3 to 5 people who are always the ones who get rewards and verbal praise.

If you implement Gamification with care, it can be transformative to your Call Center. Do your research and choose the games you think will fit best for your type of business, and soon enough, you’ll have a thriving work environment capable of producing the sweet fruits everyone can enjoy.

Gamification has become a major factor in boosting company success by improving employee performance through exciting and motivational experiences.

To successfully apply Gamification to your business, keep things fun and interesting, and do everything you can to avoid a toxic environment. Gamification can bring people together, and through healthy competition, it can also bring out the best in them.

Make sure that all your agents are having the best possible time at work without anyone having to put someone else down to climb up the ladder.

Gamification is a priceless tool to have in your arsenal as a business owner or manager and if done right, it will give you an immense advantage over the competition.

If you’ve set your mind on Gamification, don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss how we can help your business reach its full potential. Many other Smartico users are already enjoying phenomenal results: https://smartico.ai/contact-us/

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