Gamification in the Contact Centre: Stop the Common Motivation, Engagement and Productivity Killers

As the contact centre starts to embark on a process of digital transformation, it’s clear that the role of the contact centre agent will change. They will become proactive as opposed to reactive and evolve into employees that are more specialised.

It’s all part of creating a contact centre of the future, that’s shaped into a turbo-charged customer experience powerhouse. And what’s the magic ingredient to happy, engaged customers? Happy, engaged and productive employees.

One of the biggest challenges for contact centre managers is how to keep their employees motivated, engaged and still maintain the contact centres KPIs and efficiency. It’s a tricky balance to achieve.

Motivation and engagement killers

Contact centre work is often fairly repetitive, this will change as the role of the contact centre agent does, but usually the calls that agents receive, or make, are often of the same nature, which contributes towards a loss of interest in the task. Therefore meaning that productivity issues are a common theme in contact centres.

Agent performance is often measured by metrics such as average handling times and first call resolution. These metrics can have an unintentional effect on the agent, causing them to rush the enquiry to ensure they deal with it quickly and ensure it’s resolved. However, quick, slap-dash customer service doesn’t create a good customer experience.

Absenteeism is another key challenge for contact centres. It increases over time as the job becomes more transactional and less important to agents. The average employee is estimated to take 7.4 sick days per year, whilst contact centre agents are absent roughly 8.2 days per year, significantly higher than the average. This figure will decrease as the role of the contact centre agent changes to become more of a career step, but this change will not happen overnight.

Things move at a fast pace these days, it’s essential that agents keep up to date with the services or products they are helping to sell, deliver customer service on and handle queries about. A lack of understanding is demotivating for agents and cause them to be careless. Training is a brilliant way of keeping agents engaged and up to date. But, training days are at a huge expense to businesses, particularly for contact centre employees. You need something online for on the job learning.

Reward and recognition is vital to any employee’s motivation and engagement. But too often, agents are forgotten about and the metrics utilised are too simplistic. In every contact centre, there needs to be a system for recognition and reward, but another key challenge is not having the technology to facilitate this.

Disconnected systems and clunky processes are also motivation (and not to mention, productivity) killers. The average contact centre agent flitters between 10 different systems daily. Sound mindboggling? Good thing we’re experts in Unified Communications too.

Enter, gamification

Time to inject some fun into the contact centre. Gamification takes your business objectives and agent needs and turns them into metrics that engage the user and give them a greater feeling of achievement. We’ve come up with the most engaging contact centre gamification software yet.

Imagine a contact centre where you can support and develop enthusiastic agents that are at the top of their game. Revel in the success of agents competing at the top of the leader board as opposed to worry about whether it’s going to be your best agent that leaves work this week.

REWARDS enables contact centre managers to simply reward contact centre agents and spike motivation, engagement and productivity levels. It can be built with your specific business and contact centre objectives in mind and is designed to motivate your contact centre staff in line with their targets.

The software has key features like:

• Tournaments and game battles, to create a bit of healthy competition in the contact centre! Engage your employee’s competitive side.
• Map user performance against processes automation
• Reward staff with points, money and bonuses
• Integration with CRM, HR and Contact Centre technologies
• Data sharing on personalised applications, leader boards and wallboards as well as third party portals and alerts
• Downloading and exporting data

The technology is effective and easy to use and showing real benefits.

Gamification can not only target engagement, productivity and absenteeism issues, but also encourage your employee creativity and collaboration. In addition training can be incorporated into the gamification to enhance knowledge about products and services. With the right approach, your employees won’t feel like you’re monitoring them, but improving their skillset and abilities to deliver great customer service.