5 Ways Gamification can Improve Contact Center Agent Engagement

5_Ways_Gamification_Improves_Contact_Center_Agent_Engagement

Newly hired employees are always engaged, interested and excited for their new role. As time goes on and they gain the expertise in their jobs, the engagement level starts dropping as they become bored of doing the same mundane activities every day. This scenario is most common in the contact center industry where the agents become cynical and discouraged handling complaints and infuriated callers all day long. Eventually they leave and the company has to hire and train new employees. And this is an expensive affair, especially for small businesses with limited budget.
Managing a changing workforce is a persistent issue for call center managers. Lack of engagement and commitment of employees is one of the biggest challenges they face. To thrive, many call center operators of small businesses are looking for new technologies and tools so as to lower costs and enhance productivity.
Gamification comes into rescue here to cater to the above mentioned challenges as it helps in improving contact center employee engagement, increase job satisfaction and reduce employee turnover. So what is it actually?
Gamification is simply a term for applying game mechanics and behavioural modification science, methodology and techniques in business applications and processes to accelerate adoption, promote engagement, and drive ideal behaviours by making experiences fun, motivating and rewarding. It enables contact centers to incorporate gaming methods and techniques in business applications and processes to enhance and improve agent performance, motivate and drive ideal behaviours and provide recognition and rewards for goal achievement.
According to a report by Aberdeen Research, businesses that used gamification have experienced two times faster growth in their annual revenue than their peers.
Gamification involves guiding, reinforcing, and increasing high-value activity by capturing the data that your employees generate as they do their work and using that data to motivate them. It does that by giving them real-time feedback, goals to accomplish, rewards for hitting milestones, and a community of people to compete, collaborate, and share with.
Various call center gamification mechanics can be used to let the contact center agents know whether they are on the right track and what they should be working on right now. See below the several gamification techniques and their motives:
Fast Feedback – Agents can know where they are headed
Badges – Agents can see their achievements
Competition- Agents can know who is winning
Community – Agents can work as a team
Levelling up – Agents can learn more and try harder
In order to consistently drive agent engagement, an incremental and systematic approach is required that can provide data about progress and improvement. And this can be achieved with the implementation of gamification process. Let’s learn 5 ways call center gamification increases employee engagement:
Ramp-up Agent On-boarding Time
With the help of gamification, companies can enable real-time feedback system on every step. This will empower the agents to quickly learn how to do their job and enhance time to productivity.
Gamified tools can turn the training procedures of new employees into a fun exercise by inserting tasks and rewards into the process. This can boost training attendance and performance metrics as new agents are better prepared to handle demanding and enraged customers.

Improve Collaboration by Working as a Community

Building community is an important aspect of gamification. Community can drive significant amount of value from the experience of others. Members can pool their knowledge and can share their expertise and best practices with each other. With increased collaboration, they can find solutions together and lift the overall knowledge of the group.
Track your Own Progress
Gamification offers immediate and consistent feedback with the help of which agents can figure out how they are performing. They can easily keep a track of their own progress against the goals and objectives and know where they stand as compared to others and what needs to be improved to perform better.
Automate and Customize Incentive Programs
Call center operators can easily automate goal-setting process with gamification. They can run contests for employees and offer personalized experiences by tailoring these functionalities to meet the specific needs of different individuals and teams.   
Encourage Remote Agents
It is a challenge to motivate remote agents due to lack of community and engagement. It is not possible for companies to provide encouragement in person. But with gamification, call center managers can give digital praise. Agents can earn various rewards by completing certain actions such as completing training successfully or resolving a particular number of customer inquiries. Inclusion of analytics in gamification also allows managers to reward agents based on data such as average hold times, first call resolution and so on.

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