Gamification in the Contact Center

When was the last time you played a game? Did being competitive give you a boost of energy and make you feel engaged in what you were doing? According to WebMD, when a person wins a competition, their brain releases dopamine – a chemical that makes people feel good. The experience is also a learning opportunity and offers people a chance to improve their performance.

Human resource managers use game elements in the workplace to engage and motivate employees. Gamification in a traditionally non-game environment, such as when used within a company, leads to happier, more productive employees.

The Gamification at Work Survey from TalentLMS found gamification in the workplace made employees:

• Feel more productive (89%) and happier (88%).
• Believe they’d be more productive if their work was more gamified (89%).
• Feel motivated during training (83%). For comparison, 61% of those who received non-gamified training felt bored and unproductive.

The Benefits of Using Gamification in Your Call Center

According to the 2022 NICE WEM Global Survey, the call center employee attrition rate in 2021 was 42%–one of the highest percentages of all industries. The same report found that 31% of customer service agents and managers were job hunting, and 40% of that group were so unenthused with industry that they were searching for jobs in completely different fields. One of the conclusions drawn by the report was, “It’s essential that organizations find ways to engage their existing agents to enhance loyalty and retention.”

Contact center gamification is an enjoyable and engaging approach to improve agent performance. Using gamification in conjunction with key performance indicator (KPI) management, data can be presented and shared in a fun way that taps into natural human behavior to increase productivity levels and support teamwork – even if your workforce is remote.

Gamifying call center analytics not only makes it more pleasant for managers to monitor operator performance, but it can also result in agents getting a boost of morale from the camaraderie that is fostered through friendly competition and receiving performance feedback in a fun way.

Call center metrics that can be gamified include:

• Number of successful inbound calls and missed calls.
• Call transfer rates.
• Average call handling time and call length.
• Hold times and call queue wait times.
• Customer satisfaction scores and first call resolution rates.

Gamifying Contact Center Metrics

Some vendors include gamification tools in their workforce management software, while others support third-party integrations. If your contact center software has superior call metric capabilities, then you already have the data you need to take advantage of gamification in your call center.

For example, our Active Insights platform provides Automated Call Scoring to determine how well agents handle calls. The scoring is automated based on your customized settings. You can create separate scoring scripts to track operator performance regarding:

• Answer time (critical for code calls).
• Accuracy of answer phrase.
• Required questions asked.
• Proper grammar and manners (such as saying yes instead of yeah or yep; and saying please and thank you).
• Accuracy of call close.

For specialized calls, such as code calls, the scripts can verify that the agent correctly obtained the type of code, patient location, patient status, if the agent announced the code overhead (if required), along with the timing from the answer to initiation and completion of paging.

The analytics gathered by your call center software can be presented using gamification principles. Call assessments can be reported alongside informative graphs and scores to create individual and team rankings and leaderboards.

Creating a Call Center Gamification Strategy

Creating a strategy for your contact center’s use of gamification will guide decision-making and ensure the original focus(es) aren’t lost over time.

Define what you hope to achieve by incorporating gamification into your contact center. Set goals such as higher employee satisfaction, lower turnover rates, improved productivity, better caller satisfaction scores, or shorter call times.

Measure success by setting clear, attainable, and objective benchmarks. Define how your scoring system will work. Explain what data will be measured, how they will be weighted, and any rules that fit your organization’s needs. Common scoring tools include point systems, graphs, rankings, or levels.

Recognize good work and provide feedback on areas for improvement. Performance evaluation gives managers an opportunity to identify operators who would benefit from additional training and reward those who attain or exceed goals. These numbers from Gitnux highlight why it is essential for a company to have a recognition program:

• 80% of employees would work harder if they felt better appreciated.
• Strong employee recognition programs reduce turnover rates by 31%.
• Employees who are recognized are almost 6x more likely to stay at their jobs than those who aren’t.
• 92% of employees are likely to repeat a specific action if given recognition for it.