Disconnected? Disinterested? Not sure how everything fits anymore? These are often the sentiments expressed as working from home employees reshuffle pandemic style and adapt. Those who have worked at home know how hard it is to remain motivated and attentive throughout the entire day. Managers looking to mitigate these added challenges can seek solutions to help staff adapt to the environment and increase engagement and motivation.
The declining efficiency of hybrid models and remote teams is costing thousands of businesses millions every year in productivity. In a recent study, 25% of recipients found their virtual teams were not fully productive. As the pandemic shows no end in sight, operations managers need to employ solutions such as gamification to boost productivity.
So how does gamification help? Here are ways contact centres can harness the power of gamification to boost performance and engagement in remote teams.
- Improve Employee Retention
The job market within Australia is becoming difficult to navigate, with the number of staff outweighing the number of people looking for work. While many companies report substantial revenue increases, they cannot grow their workforce as required. In addition to this, the cost of onboarding is substantial. To combat this, keeping staff engaged and happy at work so that they stay is important. Gamification can help with this. One association that was able to highlight this is where a renowned provider of merchant processing services—Sekure Merchant implemented Alvaria Motivate. The company averages 120,000+ outbound calls a day and needed an intuitive solution to improve operational efficiency and agent and team leader productivity on essential key performance indicators across all employee levels. Alvaria created four distinct user interfaces that aligned features to each level of Sekure Merchant’s organisational hierarchy. The solution was aimed at clearly and quantifiably displaying goals for each agent, team leader and manager. With Alvaria Motivate, the company witnessed more transparency in realizing their goals and could also achieve improved management efficiency. For every 100 agents, they gained 10 hours of management efficiency per week. Additionally, they realized a 62 percent increase in employee retention. The company is now unifying all their motivational management activities through a single interface.
- Ability to Refine Employee Training
Training new employees is difficult when working remotely. Teaching through screensharing and phone calls limits an agent’s ability to learn and fully absorb all the information. Using gamification in the training process helps to keep staff more engaged and motivated, ultimately leading to a better customer experience.
Utilising gamification software is an adaptive and engaging way to portray information to stimulate human senses. Many of Australia’s largest contact centres have opted to use gamification-based training to improve engagement and employee retention as well as combat challenges associated with working from home.
- Increase Engagement to Boost Performance
Engagement is arguably one of the biggest challenges associated with staff working from home and is a key driving factor of productivity within a contact centre. Successful contact centres that constantly look for new ways to improve engagement and reach KPIs have directed their attention towards gamification.
Team Leaders can make training more engaging, which yields lower training costs and a better customer experience. The data also provides insight into what rewards agents want and what support they need to stay engaged and meet goals.
Gamification has become the choice amongst many large and small contact centres as adapting to the new macro-environment is a top priority to drive productivity. As everyone in the contact centre continues to adjust to changing work restrictions, gamification software presents the most cost-effective and interactive method to boost engagement and performance.
If you are looking for additional ways to manage remote teams effectively, contact our expert consultants at Call Design today. We can help your contact centre grow to new heights.