How to use gamification to improve call center performance

In their research, Deloitte found that 62% of organizations view customer experience provided through contact centers as a competitive differentiator. What’s more, 40% of the organizations that participated in the study have dedicated customer experience resources, and 82% recognized “accuracy and quality of information” as the most important customer experience attribute.

Do your call centers give you a competitive edge? Do your agents deliver quality service? Do they provide it efficiently and effectively?

Gamification can directly impact your answers to those questions. Here’s how:

Gamification leverages fundamental design principles, big data analytics and the latest research about universal human motivators to influence employee actions. What you might not know is that gamification has proven particularly useful in call centers. Why? Because by tracking activities and responses to incentives, gamification can help call center agents make real, measurable improvements to key performance indicators (KPIs).

For example, gamification can impact key call center performance metrics, such as:

• First call resolution
• Average handle time
• Customer satisfaction scores
• Upsell/cross-sell success
• Billable utilization %

After implementing a gamification solution, call center managers can drive the behaviors that improve these metrics. Even better, call center managers can also determine which agents are motivated to improve their performance... and why.

Remember, if you want to cultivate community collaboration, improve engagement and drive the long-term behavior changes that become the foundation of improved business performance, you need to implement an ongoing strategy, one that continually guides, reinforces and increases high-value agent activity.

Gamification is effective because it uses big data analytics, personalization and transparency, gamification provides not only goals to accomplish, but also recognition, rewards that matter and real-time feedback about progress. As a result, gamification motivates call center agents to improve performance and delivers true business value.

We know that gamification can improve transparency around the behaviors that are important to your organization while inspiring your call center agents to become more self-driven to achieve those metrics. Gamification changes “have to do” behaviors into “want to do” behaviors, and that, in turn, improves service performance in meaningful – and measureable – ways.