Contact Centre Gamification
It’s time to level up!
How gamification can help you to boost morale, increase
efficiency and enhance the customer experience
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Contents
Introduction 3
When technology fails your customers… 4
Technology Challenges 4
When technology fails your agents… 5
What is Gamification? 6
The Next Logical Step – Contact Centre Gamification 6
Before you start
make sure that you have the right building blocks in place 7
The rules of the game 8
Does your call centre have a problem?
If you are anything like most of the contact centres that we talk to, you are likely to be dealing with an issue that just won’t go away, and one that is leading to customer dissatisfaction and agent churn. Somewhere along the way your contact centre has made the strategic decision that a new organisational chart and technology alone are your best options to manage the ever-shifting expectations of your customers.
But technology and the new team structures aren’t delivering on the business case and the very people the change was supposed to empower are still de-motivated, leading to poor customer service and disappointing performance.
Low morale and the resulting impact of high staff turnover and absence is one of the biggest problems the contact centre industry faces. It impacts every layer of the business and the fundamental purpose of your operation.
It can feel like you’re constantly fire-fighting, in spite of your best intentions. So how can you break the cycle?
We think there is an answer: It’s time to put people at the heart of
great customer service once again. And contact-centre gamification
– the application of game-mechanics to customer service to make it more engaging – is one way to achieve that vision.
Jaime Scott
Managing Director, EvaluAgent
Introduction
Jaime has 17 years’ experience leading customer service operations and
customer experience improvement teams and programmes for leading UK
brands. As Head of Customer Insight and Improvement at Orange, he established
the organisation’s first customer experience function and played a leading role
in helping the company to top the JD Power customer satisfaction awards six
years running. As Customer Experience Director at Barclays Bank and Vertex,
he led teams to design and implement enterprise-level contact management and
workforce optimisation solutions for a range of well-known brands including
M&S, Tesco Bank, National Trust, Scottish Power and Selfridges.
Low morale and the
resulting impact of high
staff turnover and absence
is one of the biggest
problems the contact centre
industry faces
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Smartphones, tablets, social
networking, instant messaging;
the way we talk to each other has
changed massively over the last
decade.
The way we communicate is changing fast.
And it’s a struggle to keep up.
Smartphones, tablets, social networking, instant messaging; the way we talk to each other has changed massively over the last decade. And consumers, especially those who have grown up with these new technologies, want to be able to communicate with businesses in the same way.
To say the contact centre industry has been left behind would be an under statement. And this issue is not just affecting customer satisfaction; it’s impacting all aspects of the business from agent motivation through to revenues and the bottom line.
To be fair, many contact centres have made efforts to address the
shift. But in most cases it’s an efficiency-focused, rather than a
customer-focused approach. Perhaps one of the scenarios on the
right applies to your contact centre?
When technology fails your customers…
Bolted together legacy technology that is unable to adequately track and manage
customers attempting to communicate with you across multiple channels.
Legacy
Technology
OR
New technology brought in to address the problem, but with the wrong focus; rather than enable agents to better manage
customers, it attempts to replace agents with technology. And, by itself, technology does not do a good job of creating engaged
employees or loyal customers.
New
Technology
When technology fails your agents…
Not only is technology failing to address the needs of your
customers, it is also contributing to agent dissatisfaction.
Your agents are either not being given the tools they need to do their job, or someone somewhere has decided a technology system can do a better job of talking to customers than they can.
Contact centres are driven by metrics, which in itself is not a negative thing. However, it does become an issue when managers start viewing their agents as robots and forget how their emotions and behaviours drive those metrics.
At the end of the day, business success depends on people’s performance so helping agents to feel valued, supported and motivated goes a long way towards achieving your business objectives.
The first thing to understand about these new
technologies is that, be it a smartphone or a social network, the technology is still just an enabler for conversations with real people.
Your contact centre agents speak to thousands of customers weekly, or even daily. Even though the cause of all these new channels of communication is technology, the modern contact centre must not just be technology-centric, butpeople-centric.
There is a growing body of evidence to demonstrate that
contact centre gamification is a powerful enabler for creating a truly people-centric contact centre.
According to the Gallup
Employee Engagement Index,
“service worker” is the only
category of worker less engaged
today than in 2009.
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Gamification is a relatively new phenomenon in business.
Until very recently, it has only been applied to incentivising desirable customer actions and behaviours. The theory being that by giving products and services an element of gameplay, customers will buy more and remain loyal in order to continue to earn points or badges. In this capacity, it’s a simple way of maximising customer loyalty by enabling customers to enjoy interacting with your business, while making them feel rewarded and valued for their custom.
To cite a couple of common examples, you may have competed with friends to check-in to more places or leave more tips on the location-based social network, Foursquare. Or perhaps you’ve gained
NikeFuel points while using the fitness brand’s apps and products to
stay in shape.
There is however, a use for gamification beyond marketing and
loyalty, which could potentially bring even greater rewards to your business…
What is Gamification?
The concept of applying game-mechanics
(E.g. points, badges, competition) to
non-game environments to make them more
fun and engaging.
Typically used to encourage customers
to engage with a product or service, and
increasingly used to motivate employees.
Gamification
/ɡeɪmɪfɪˈkeɪʃ(ə)n/ noun
Gamification is not new to contact centres.
Many of us remember the “good old days” when there was a
leaderboard on the flip-chart, a wheel of fortune in the corner, and a
star-of-the-day trophy on someone’s desk.
It may bring a wry smile to your face, but that level of engagement and fun went a long way to encouraging team-work and making
a difficult and sometimes repetitious job more enjoyable and less
stressful.
However there were two major problems with this approach: it was almost impossible to maintain fairness and consistency across the whole team; and it just took far too long to pull all the stats together
and keep those flip-charts updated.
Contact Centre Gamification solves both of these problems in a
single stroke because it is based upon a system-based approach to recognition and reward. That means fairness and consistency is guaranteed; while contact centre managers are freed up to spend time on what should be their highest priority - coaching and training agents.
And the rewards don’t have to be costly – far from it, as we will explain later on.
The Next Logical Step – Contact Centre Gamification
...the “good old days” when
there was a leaderboard
on the flip-chart, a wheel of
fortune in the corner, and a
star-of-the-day trophy on
someone’s desk.
The good news is that contact centres actually lend themselves well
to the concept of gamification.
A well-run contact centre is already monitoring lots of metrics. The first challenge is using all of that information to coach,
develop and motivate staff in a way that empowers them to strive for higher levels of performance.
Before you start
make sure that you have the right building blocks in place
Identify the business outcomes you want to motivate and enhance. There are lots to
choose from so select metrics and targets using a balanced score-card approach:
Identify and capture accurate data on contact centre activity and
(principally) customer-driven actions and results that are linked to those
business outcomes.
Implement a robust people-management framework:
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
PEOPLE:
Improve employee morale and motivation
Feedback performance data in real time to agents and team leaders
Use the data to generate specific actions and goals and track improvement
Initiate collaborative coaching sessions with agents to facilitate
improvement.
Implement efficient and effective performance management agreements
and HR processes.
CUSTOMER:
Deliver a WOW customer experience
COSTS:
Deliver efficiency savings
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Every good game needs a set of rules to play by,
and contact centre gamification is no different.
Based on our experience, here are the 10 rules we believe will make gamification a success in your contact centre:
The rules of the game
Think long and hard about the culture you want to create
When it comes to changing behaviour, gamification can be very powerful, so before you start, it is important to think
about the kind of behaviour you want to encourage. This comes back to having the right building blocks in place and creating a very clear link between people, performance and business outcomes.
Enhance, recognise and reward results rather than actions
Actions may speak louder than words, but results mean more than both. Make sure you recognise and reward the outcomes of actions, rather than the actions themselves. Make sure you don’t become prey to the rule of unintended consequences; for example, if you incentivise agents to close cases, you’ll get lots of closed cases, but
you may also get lots of customers who are dissatisfied because their queries haven’t been fully addressed.
Focus on improvement and consistency as well as high performance
Gamification in the contact centre should be as inclusive as possible. It is vital to reward consistency and
improvement as well as high achievement. Gamification is about improving performance across the board, not just for your star performers. In fact, gamification’s ability to motivate new starters and under-achievers is one of its main benefits.
Auto-assign points and minimise the manual allocation of points
We know that keeping track of metrics on flip-charts and wallboards can be an administrative headache. So ensure
you have the systems in place to auto-assign points rather than allocating them manually. Aside from minimising the effort required, automating the allocation of points ensures that recognition is fair and consistent.
Minimise the chance of cynical employees gaming the system
We have alluded (in rule 2) to the unintended consequences of rewarding actions rather than results. Unfortunately one of those consequences can be agents gaming the system. Make sure you set up anti-gaming controls and create a reward structure that ensures you don’t end up incentivising the wrong behaviour.
1.
3.
2.
4.
Gamification in the contact centre
should be as inclusive as possible.
It is vital to reward consistency
and improvement as well as high
achievement.
7.
9.
8.
10.
Gamification will only work if
it supports clear operational
goals and if your leadership team
embraces it with enthusiasm
Encourage inclusive, healthy competition
This really goes back to the point about culture, but we can’t stress it too much. Competition might seem daunting to some agents, but by making it transparent, inclusive and healthy, no one has anything to worry about. You can do this by teaming up your high performers with low performers to encourage peer support and collaboration. Encourage everyone to work together by creating supporting programmes, and involve agents in coming up with their own challenges and targets.
Include real rewards
As we said earlier, rewards don’t have to be expensive, but they do have to have value to the recipient. Think about
rewards that will encourage a more positive culture. A half day off, parking spot closer to the office entrance or
your manager taking your calls for an afternoon can all be great motivators. We have also seen instances where a written letter of congratulations from a CEO makes a huge difference. Involve the agents too by asking them what rewards will motivate them.
Keep it simple
Like your customers, many of your agents may be at home with the latest technology, but they are quickly going to
lose interest in a system that is difficult to use. A simple and efficient user interface is especially important for those
less tech savvy team members.
Make it fun and compulsive, but not distracting
Gamification is meant to increase your agent’s focus on customer service, not distract them from the task at hand. By keeping it simple and easy but focussed on results, you can ensure that gamification doesn’t become another
‘gimmick’ or an additional piece of reporting software that is detracting from your agents’ focus.
Create a people-centric contact centre
This is the most important point. Gamification is a fantastic tool for motivating agents and achieving greater
customer satisfaction, but it is just that: a tool. It will only work if it supports clear operational goals and if your leadership team embraces it with enthusiasm. Remember for a call centre to be truly people-centric it must recognise the needs of people, not technology.
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Conclusion
For a long time the contact centre has looked to CRM technology to provide the answers, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds along the way and creating some new problems, as well as solving old ones.
Today, true innovation lies in recognising the needs of the people you employ in your contact centre and those of the customers they are there to serve. We all really do work harder and more effectively when we are valued – and your people management strategy should achieve just that.
Imagine a contact centre where the longest queues were made up of staff eager to join your team and where agent
retention was just not an issue! Gamification can help make this vision a reality.
Imagine a contact centre where the longest
queues were made up of staff eager to join
your team and where agent retention was
just not an issue! Gamification can help
EVALUAGENT
About EvaluAgent
EvaluAgent is workforce optimisation and people management software designed for call centres and back-office operations.
It is cloud-based and offers a suite of modules that can be plugged together in any combination, with little or no need for integration with your existing systems. We’ve specifically designed the Contact-Centre Gamification module to apply game-mechanics to a contact centre environment and put people back at the heart of great customer service.