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Mar 10, 2020 Thomas Cannon

What is Call Center Gamification?

If your company manages its customer service strategy in house, you’ll probably know just how difficult it is to keep staff motivated and engaged while at the same time ensuring you hit important metrics and efficiencies.

Staff engagement is possibly one of the most challenging aspects of the modern business, and that’s why many organizations are putting increased emphasis on improving their company culture in order to improve employee morale.

Most employees are not engaged in their work. Research from Gallup found that 34 percent of US employees, and just 15 percent worldwide, were engaged with their work.

Call centers, however, are using a wide range of new strategies to ensure their customer service representatives are engaged - encouraging them to offer a world-class customer experience (CX) to clients. One of those strategies is gamification.

What is gamification in the call center?

In its simplest definition, gamification is the process of using gaming principles to achieve non-gaming outcomes.

Call center gamification is the implementation of game mechanics in the workplace in an effort to improve employee engagement, drive motivation and celebrate achievements. Gamification helps to solve problems in the call center in a way that is fun.

Gamification could either encourage agents to complete set objectives and compete with other agents, or it could be used to focus on improving each agent's own personal performance by rewarding individual actions and improvements.

There are a wide range of metrics that call centers can gamify, including:

  • First call resolution
  • Number of phone calls made
  • Average handle time (AHT)
  • Service levels
  • Average speed to answer the phone

Common call center challenges that gamification can address

There are a number of challenges that traditional call centers face that negatively impact motivation and engagement. That’s why modern outsourced contact centers are addressing those with innovative solutions such as gamification.

Common challenges in the call center include following scripts that become boring, dealing with repetitive tasks and customer queries, limited growth and learning opportunities and performance metrics that stifle innovation.

Gamification can address these challenges by monitoring agent performance and rewarding them with instant feedback when they complete tasks successfully, hit milestones or improve on their existing performance levels.

Rewarding call center agents through gamification could include anything from monthly cash bonuses, a peer-to-peer appreciation trophy, a level-up system that gives privileges to best-performing agents and much more.

What are the benefits of call center gamification?

By addressing the above challenges, gamification will help call centers realize a wide range of benefits, which, in turn, will improve your company’s customer service strategy and help you deliver a world-class experience. Here are just a few ways that call center gamification can help benefit your brand:

Effectively deliver training: As part of a gamification strategy, call centers are able to deliver training in a fun and engaging way. That means customer service representatives are constantly striving to better themselves, and are able to deliver better experiences to your customers as a result.

Empower agents to go above and beyond: As agents push themselves to perform better and develop through training, they will become more innovative and creative. That allows call centers to ensure their agents go further than just talking from a script, instead coming up with new ideas that solve customer queries.

Encourage healthy competition: Through gamification, call centers are able to foster an environment of healthy competition. The result? Customer service representatives will be constantly improving how they resolve customer queries in a bid outperform other agents. This creates a customer service program that consistently improves.

Do you want to learn more about the benefits of call center gamification, or simply want to know how Advantage Communications can transform your company’s customer service strategy? Contact our team of experts today.

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Published by Thomas Cannon March 10, 2020