Insights
The game changer: the ultimate guide to call center gamification
In the dynamic world of contact center operations, innovation is crucial – and one such innovation making a significant impact is gamification.
After all, there’s good reason for companies to invest in providing a positive culture, beyond attracting great talent. Companies with engaged staff typically experience not just lower turnover, but 20% higher profits according to a study by Gallup.
But how does this translate to the contact center, an industry with an above-average attrition rate and an agent remit that becomes more challenging every year? How do you attract and engage staff against a backdrop of demanding customers and shifting goal posts?
Contact centers grapple with challenges such as high turnover rates and low job satisfaction. Increasing complexity of queries due to self-serve or chat bots picking up routine tasks, pressure to resolve issues quickly and increasingly demanding customers can lead to agent burnout. Indeed, some call centers have an annual turnover rate exceeding 100%, meaning today’s workforce may not be there even a year from now.
How can call centers resolve burnout and improve retention?
The answer lies in gamification. Gamification is the notion of taking familiar, game-like mechanics and applying them beyond the realm of a traditional game setup: like employee management such as in the contact center.
By integrating game design elements into everyday tasks, gamification transforms agent engagement and productivity, ultimately enhancing the customer experience.
Gamification riffs off the massive, ubiquitous growing popularity of digital gaming. And it’s not slowing down.
According to Mordor Intelligence, the global gamification market is expected to grow from $15.43 billion in 2024, to $48.72 billion by 2029. So, gamification won’t be a novelty: it’ll start to become the norm.
What does gamification involve?
Gamification isn’t about employees playing games on company time, it’s about bringing the essence of games – fun, employee engagement, healthy competition, achievement – into the workplace.
If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I’ll just finish this task, then I’ll treat myself to one of the fancy biscuits”, you’re already well-versed in the idea of gamification.
Gamification is everywhere when you start to look for it. From motivational messages from your bank about savings goals, to keeping up your daily streak of language learning, gamification helps people dig deep and find extra motivation while they build their discipline.
It comes down to this: us humans love recognition. We love a reward. Whether it’s chocolate, a new pair of shoes, or virtual points.
We love to benchmark ourselves, track progress, and see the difference from where we were then, to now. Fortunately, this works just as well in the contact center.
By introducing points, badges, and leaderboards into daily tasks, gamification makes work more engaging and rewarding for your agents. However, it’s not about replacing intrinsic motivation (that comes from within) with extrinsic rewards. Instead, it’s about enhancing intrinsic motivation by providing feedback that allows contact center agents to excel in their roles.
Games trigger primal human motivations and emotions, such as the thrill of competition, the joy of achievement, and the satisfaction of cooperation. By introducing these aspects into the contact center, we transform mundane tasks into engaging challenges and colleagues into teammates with a shared quest.
Examples of call center gamification
Successful gamification in contact centers hinges on thoughtful implementation. It’s not about awarding points for just showing up or creating a competitive environment that distracts agents from serving customers. Instead, gamification should be used to make work more intrinsically rewarding.
1. A points system based on employee performance metrics
evaluagent enables centers to implement a points system based on agent performance activities. Agents earn points for being active in the platform, achieving high customer satisfaction scores, or achieving high quality scores. These points can then be redeemed for rewards, creating a direct link between performance and incentives.
2. Badges for skill mastery
Badges are awarded to customer support agents demonstrating mastery in areas like technical knowledge, problem-solving, or communication skills. This motivates agents to improve their skills and makes their progress visible to peers and supervisors.
3. Leaderboards for friendly competition
Leaderboards foster a sense of friendly competition among agents. By displaying top performers in categories like fastest resolution time or highest customer satisfaction, leaderboards inspire agents to strive for excellence. evaluagent ensures this competition doesn’t detract from the team’s collaborative spirit or the primary goal of serving customers.
4. Missions or challenges
Missions or challenges make workdays more engaging and fun. An agent might be challenged to achieve a certain performance level within a week or to complete eLearning. Completing these missions could earn the agent special recognition or rewards.
5. Progress bars and levels
Like in video games, progress bars and levels represent an agent’s progress or skill level. As agents gain experience and improve their skills, they ‘level up’. This visual representation of progress can be a powerful motivator.
Considerations when implementing gamification
Ultimately, gamification is about making work more fun. You might be raring to dive in, but there are some key considerations you’ll want to think about first.
Create rewards that resonate
First things first, gamification only works if the reward feels valuable to the “player”. In this case, your agents.
It’s vital that this early stage of designing your gamification program is done well. A good place to start is by including your agents in the conversation.
Crowdsource ideas around rewards, challenges, and achievements to ensure they align with your agents’ interests and work for your business too.
Remember, rewards don’t have to be monetary. Industry conference tickets, shift selection, extra time off, or a lie-in, or a chance to shadow Team Leaders, can also go down a storm. There’s a lot to be said for choice and the chance to build their careers with personal development.
Create fair and inclusive mechanics
Once you’re sure you’ve got your agents excited about the potential rewards on offer, it’s time to set up mechanics that keep them engaged. For example, will you have leaderboards? A point system? Discuss with your agents how they might like to be recognized. For example, do they want shout-outs in meetings? To be an agent of the month?
This is all about ensuring all your agents have equal opportunities to participate and excel in the gamified environment. Otherwise, you could have the opposite effect of demotivating some agents.
We want to avoid that at all costs, so you might like to consider success measures around productivity, empathy, compliance, pass rates, and so on, and then decide how these will be recognized. With rewards, badges, certificates? It’s up to you!
Align with existing processes
Effective gamification programs should integrate seamlessly into your existing meetings and workflows. You don’t want your program to start upheaving embedded processes. Instead, think about ways gamification can help better support those things. Assign more points for 100% passes, or agents who nail compliance, as examples.
Also, weighting the program to suit your QA priorities is a sure-fire way to build in intrinsic value. That way, gamification becomes something your employees recognize as not just making work that bit more interesting, but also as something that helps them contribute in a meaningful, visible way to the business.
Monitor and adapt the program
Gamification isn’t a “set it and forget it” scenario. You’ll need to regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy, making any necessary adjustments to keep it engaging.
After a pilot period, ask your agents for their thoughts. And as the person leading the game-making, don’t forget to analyze its impact. Has agent engagement increased? How do quality scores look? What your pass/fail ratio looking like now?
If you can prove the business value of your program, you can look at ways of iterating on it with more resources: or even bringing AI into the mix to help maintain and improve the program as time goes on.
A word of warning! If you don’t dedicate the necessary ramp-up time and you implement your program poorly, gamification can become a double-edged sword. If staff are regularly appearing at the bottom of leaderboards, don’t care for the rewards, or see the same people winning, they’ll get demotivated. That’s why agent input is essential, alongside monitoring the impact it’s having..
How does gamification address high attrition?
High turnover is a huge problem, since it doesn’t just negatively impact the wider team with intense workloads but costs the company money in trying to recruit and train replacements.
Companies that invest in gamification strategies can lower turnover. That’s because employees are more engaged, feel more “seen”, and are therefore less likely to leave.
Remember: you’re only likely to unlock this type of success with a well-considered program. Your agents aren’t to be underestimated, since most of them will see through any thinly veiled attempts to get results with “quick wins”.
Your strategy, then, has to appeal to your agents first, before you consider its potential positive impact on customers.|
Benefit from motivated remote teams
Lack of visibility and appreciation can also affect agents. Ultimately, people want to know their contributions are valued and meaningful.
Rewards, badges, and leaderboards all help improve that visibility and turn effort into recognition: something that’s especially handy if you have hybrid or remote teams.
With hybrid and remote contact centers becoming more common since the pandemic, gamification can provide a helpful mechanic that better connects remote teams, keeping them involved and motivated. In fact, according to Centrical, 90% of employees say gamification makes them more productive.|
How is gamification changing?
Now, gamification has been around for some time already, but with appetite for the concept continuing to grow and technology advancing, it looks like gamification could be set to be even more engaging.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has naturally had a huge impact on the industry since ChatGPT first launched. From instantly summarizing conversations, to generating a rationale for QA scores, to providing coaching tips based on where agents are struggling, AI presents a wealth of different ways to help contact centers improve service and make efficiency gains.
Now, with further developments from ChatGPT, we can expect AI to start featuring more in gamification. Here are four examples where this technology could enhance gamification in the near future.
Adaptive training scenarios
With AI being able to handle dynamic content creation, it can generate personalized training modules, quizzes, and scenarios based on each agent’s performance data and learning pace.
So, for example, if an agent struggled with a particular type of customer query, AI can generate specific training scenarios to address that weakness, essentially creating a sandbox for agents to learn in a judgement-free zone.
Tailored challenges
Similarly to adaptive training, AI can create individualized challenges based on an agent’s performance history and current skill level.
For example, if an agent has consistently high scores in handling technical issues, but struggles with empathy, the AI might set a challenge to focus on enhancing their soft skills.
By analyzing gameplay data, ChatGPT can identify patterns and suggest improvements for game design, difficulty balancing, and user retention strategies.
Smart rewards
Like advanced social media algorithms, AI analysis can use historic data to learn what type of rewards are most motivating for different agents and recommend more of these, ensuring that gamification remains effective in driving engagement and performance.
Storytelling and immersion
At its most advanced, we predict that AI could go even further, crafting engaging narratives that turn everyday tasks into immersive experiences.
For example, agents could embark on a quest to achieve certain QA (quality assurance) milestones, with the AI generating a story and providing rewards for progression. The more agents do, the more the story unfolds.
Perhaps in the future, agents could even specify a genre that they’re most interested in keeping the experience engaging and motivating.
All in all, these types of developments serve to help agents compete more with themselves than the wider team: which is a brilliant win for intrinsic motivation.
This level of personalization simply isn’t achievable with humans alone (who would have time to make a gamification program for every agent?), but it presents a tantalizing look at just how advanced and employee-centric culture within the contact center could be.
evaluagent can help you master gamification
Looking ahead, the potential of gamification in contact centers is huge. As more companies recognize the benefits of this approach, it’s likely we’ll see more innovative uses of gamification.
When implemented correctly, call center gamification can make work more engaging and rewarding for agents, leading to improved productivity and customer service. But remember, gamification is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It needs to be tailored to the specific needs and challenges of each contact center to yield the best results – and evaluagent stands as a perfect partner to facilitate this transformation.
See gamification in action in our Community product tour.
By Chris Mounce
Chris is EvaluAgent’s Digital Training and Enablement Specialist and an award-winning performance coach. He takes the lead on developing innovative training solutions relating to our product to deliver maximum value.
