When we start to integrate gamification into our contact centre WFO platforms there’s a tendency to want to gamify everything! But what can you gamify and what should you avoid gamifying like the plague!?
What is Gamification?
If you haven’t heard of gamification before to put it simply it’s a tool that’s now used in a lot of telephony platforms that allows you to create leagues or assign points for particular milestones or achievements, this links into some of the KPI’s and metrics that we commonly use in the contact centre and can pull from CRM’s telephony reports or Productivity and WFM tools to help you gamify aspect of the contac
t centre performance
So what’s good to gamify?
In FAB’s contact centre we gamify behaviours that we want to nourish and create consistent trends around, some good examples of these tend to be around, Quality assurance, driving good quality customer outcomes and doing this consistently, customer feedback where you link your customer surveys to the Telephony systems you can recognise great examples of customer feedback either through NPS or CSAT or verbatim comments and reward these, certain sales metrics which we’ll talk about a little later and then team values, going the extra mile and Supporting your colleagues.
QA is great example of something that can be gamified quite easily, for example in FAB Contact centres there are 3 things we want people to focus on, getting great Quality outcomes , going over and above for our customers with flawless quality performance and consistency in performance so we award points for these and set streaks for building consistency which people can exchange for rewards. the rewards can then accumulate into something which can be redeemed in your shop which you can set particular rewards or prizes for people to compete for.
What’s the risk?
When you incentivise performance the risk is we focus on the wrong metrics which can be detrimental and ends up incentivising the wrong behaviours and this is what we are trying to create and influence, driving behaviours that improve consistency, performance, customer outcomes and a little fun along the way, but there are some unintended consequences when we start to incentivise people so avoid some of the below or give them real consideration for the unintended consequences:
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AHT – this can lead to call cutting, lack of ownership in the team and removal of key info that should Absolutely be given just to reduce handling time.
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Sickness absence levels – incentivising attendance can mean people come in when they aren’t well and feel pressured to work when they should be resting.
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Adherence – this can be tricky as we want people to adhere to schedule but incentivising adherence can mean agents do exactly that, cut calls and show no flexibility to colleagues or customers.
But what about sales performance?
Sales performance if you are in a sales role is absolutely one to gamify but think careful about what you are trying to achieve and again the unintended consequences as these can lead to pressure tactics and miss selling to get the sale, the commission and the points and prizes.
With sales Campaigns that I’ve run in the past and for FAB Contact Centres a goo example and one which i would recommend focusing on would be cancellation rates of customers. Making the sales only counts if that customer goes on to pay for the service, so cancellation rates within the first 14-30 days is a good metric to monitor as we want to incentive sales that stick so rewarding points for low cancellation rates is good idea.
Another metric that’s also useful is Customer time, the more time we spend actively talking to customers or contacting our customers can only be a good thing, the amount of time we spend building relationships, getting to understand our customers needs and being proactive with these relationships and customers can drive loyalty, higher spend value and repeat purchases.
The risk when using points for each sale or achieving target and “smashing” performance is the incentive may drive poor choices and bad decisions which may be as a result of shiny prizes and money or the pressure to be seen as a top performer, but you can still incentivise volume and revenue targets but we need to ensure that you have a robust Q&A process to eliminate any rogue behaviours and monitor spikes and trends and focus on group level targets as well as individual triggers.
Summary
When bringing teams together to drive engagement, team targets and team rewards are also great use cases for gamification driving team spirit by setting team targets to help pull people together and don’t forget to include and recognise people who are making progress and showing that they are taking onboard feedback and showing most improvement in performance.
Do you use gamification in your contact centre? If so what do you use? We’d love to hear about how you are making it work and share tips!?
