BEYOND SALES
TO CONNECTION:
APPLYING GAMIFICATION
TO BOTH CUSTOMER AND
EMPLOYEE ENVIRONMENTS
BY JOHN GOODMAN AND JEFF CHRISTOFIS
Gamification is often simply viewed as a supercharged version of a loyalty program that provides more nuanced benefits to stimulate customer sales and loyalty. However, gamification in today’s world goes beyond the traditional approach of focusing on driving consumer sales to include loyalty, engagement, and brand enhancement. It is being used with equal success as a motivational technique to drive superior employee performance in a world gone gaming. In this paper, we’ll first list different approaches to gamification and illustrate how this strategy can be used to motivate customers into atypical behaviors. Then we’ll go on to show how it is being used to motivate employee behaviors in ways that were previously unthinkable.
p3 What is gamification?
p4 How gamification can be used to motivate customer behaviors
p6 Why apply gamification techniques to contact center employee motivation?
p8 Getting started with gamification
p8 Award vs. competition
p10 Lessons learned
p10 Gamification vendor selection process
p11 Accuracy of accounting
p12 Business benefits of gamification
CONTENTS
WHAT IS
GAMIFICATION?
Gamification essentially involves providing rewards to customers and employees, and in some cases the opportunity to play games, based on their behavior. In its traditional approach, if the customer buys more products, they get tangible benefits such as discounts, free airline tickets, or priority for upgrades or rebooking when the flight is cancelled. In many ways, this is a simple commercial transaction: I spend more, I get certain benefits. There are other approaches to gamification where the techniques go beyond encouraging sales to actually facilitate connection, engagement, and fun. What follows are some of these strategies.
• Recognition as a valued customer: Offering special status within a community the customer cares about for contributions.
• Encourage feedback: Providing access, and showing what is done with the feedback. • Provide public visibility and recognition: Posting photos and videos.
• Create entertainment and fun: Customers enjoy watching entertaining videos and feel “smart” or “in the know” when they can refer them to others.
• Feeling of control or impact: Customers are gratified when they see changes in products or corporate behavior based on their input. They feel valued, respected and powerful.
• Validation of participation or actions: Feedback provides reinforcement of the
importance of the customers’ actions, whether it’s the good work done with a donation or enhancement of the environment.
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Customers are gratified when
they see changes in products or
corporate behavior based on their
input. They feel valued, respected
and powerful.
Many companies publicize their gamification strategies to motivate customer behaviors. What follows are some well-known examples of motivational gamification.
• Boyd Gaming® designates top gamblers as Diamond customers and allows them to
go to the front of the buffet line. Occasionally, the company even compensates them with free rooms and meals.
• Chick-fil-A invites customers to come to the store dressed up as cows and provides incentives in the form of free products. Also, customers are encouraged to submit videos and photos for the company’s Facebook page. The submitted media provide entertainment and are great fun to both produce and see online.
• Intuit® encourages customers to participate in its support function, going beyond
simply helping with operational software issues to actually providing advice on tax policy to CPAs and users. The most prolific supporters and participants are recognized as power users and support stars. One incentive beyond public recognition is entry into a special chat room. Finally, there is a section of the community that contains accounting jokes and other entertaining content that make the site fun to visit. • Starbucks® recognizes heavy users with badges and extra benefits, e.g. a free
item with every 12 purchases. It also goes further in encouraging suggestions via Mystarbucksideas that’s so far generated over 200,000 ideas, many of which have been implemented. Photos of contributors along with their suggestions are posted, as well as a listing of those who have made the most input to the site. There’s also ongoing feedback on ideas in terms of where they are in the consideration process, e.g. review, pilot test, implementation, which gives customers a feeling of having an impact. There is one apparent stay-at-home dad who has made over 10,000 suggestions. I’m not sure his kids are getting the necessary attention!
HOW GAMIFICATION CAN
BE USED TO MOTIVATE
CUSTOMER BEHAVIORS
Being part of a community is a
basic human need. Accenture
recently reported that the average
American is now a member of
46 communities of which 26 are
online vs. 12 in the early 2000s.
• Stack Overflow® is an online community for sophisticated programmers and system
developers who encounter difficult technical problems. A community member presents the problem, and the community members then suggest fixes or solutions. The person who poses the issue as well as other community members vote on which fix is the most effective or innovative. This recognition from the community is highly prized by members; you’re basically voted the smartest member of the group. • Mercedes Benz® features a standard dashboard screen that shows the percentage
of the trip a driver’s been driving in an environmentally responsible manner. While I think many aspects of gamification are silly, I’ve found myself trying to get from 72% to 75%, so even I am susceptible to such manipulation by feedback. Being part of a community is a basic human need. Accenture recently reported that the average American is now a member of 46 communities of which 26 are online vs. 12 in the early 2000s. As more of our existence goes online, the value of online recognition within those communities increases.
HOW GAMIFICATION CAN BE USED TO MOTIVATE CUSTOMER BEHAVIORS
KellyConnect is the trailblazer of virtual contact centers, leveraging a remote workforce that’s spread across a wide geography in order to realize the many benefits that doing so holds over the traditional brick and mortar contact centers. However, virtual contact centers typically encounter very specific challenges with employee engagement in terms of creating and maintaining a sense of community and loyalty to the company. Things like employee social gatherings, team building exercises, or general peer interaction take on a new challenge when individual team members span several counties, and sometimes states. Moreover, customer care employees often experience a lack of motivation due to the highly repetitive tasks required of them. This is problematic, as it is vitally important for contact center representatives to be engaged and represent the company well, understanding that in today’s connected world, even one bad customer experience can create a significant backlash via any multitude of social media outlets, damaging your brand’s reputation. Of course, employees, being people, are also motivated by recognition, achievement, progress, control, input, competitions, and social status. Keenly aware of this, KellyConnect has studied how gamification can be a highly effective strategy to motivate contact center staff to improve and excel.
• Gamers are typically strong performers, as their specific skill set translates well to the Home-Based Agent contact center environment.
• Customer care work is typically highly repetitive, and some variation is attractive. Gamification, by inviting engagement, can create excitement and energy that carries over to the customer service experience.
• Gamification provides the opportunity for low-waged employees to earn monetary awards with high frequency and consistency for achieving specific performance objectives, thereby supplementing their income on a regular basis.
• Reloadable debit cards or gift cards provide the added benefit of re-experiencing the “feel good moment,” and sense of pride and accomplishment every time they use that card to make a purchase.
WHY APPLY GAMIFICATION
TECHNIQUES TO CONTACT
CENTER EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION?
Customer care work is
typically highly repetitive, and
some variation is attractive.
Gamification, by inviting
engagement, can create excitement
and energy that carries over to the
customer service experience.
WHY APPLY GAMIFICATION TECHNIQUES TO CONTACT CENTER EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION?
• While I’ve always been skeptical of “Thank You for Great Service” certificates based on customer compliments, I’ve noted that they are consistently posted on cubical walls as badges of excellence and success, whether for viewing by the employee’s peers or, in a home-based service setting family and the employee themselves.
Below are a few examples of how gamification has been used to enhance contact center performance.
• Training: As Scott Buchanan writes in his DataInformed article “Using Gamification to Boost Performance in the Call Center” instead of spending time and money on sending employees to training sessions, you can create educational games that require employees to complete a series of steps or activities at a specific level.[1]
The faster or better they complete the steps, the more they’re rewarded—while simultaneously reaching higher levels of proficiency.
• Expertise: Employees who consistently score well in a specific game can advise their colleagues on how to improve their performance by means of specific actions or best practices.
• Going above and beyond: Since contact center customers typically have complex problems that need resolving, employees who go the extra mile to assist them and even turn them into brand advocates can be rewarded.
• Aiming gamification at low performers: With the promise of a monetary and/or status reward for higher performance, low performers are incentivized to improve.
You don’t have to launch gamification in a complex manner. In fact, your existing
communication, recognition, and input processes are the foundation for any gamification initiative. You’ll just be doing them in a more thoughtful, systematic manner. The three key steps are:
Assess your existing processes and identify the customer/employee behaviors you want to encourage. Be specific.
Pick one behavior and identify two actions that will encourage that behavior. Feedback and recognition are the easiest. Execute those actions for 10 customers or 10 employees, and observe the impact and results.
Learn from step two, and slowly roll out within the constraints of your resources— better a small success than a big disaster. Only start communicating to the employee base when you have a sustainable process.
Award vs. competition
With today’s mature technology, it’s perfectly possible to fully integrate gamification into the work process, which allows for the creation of a healthily competitive environment. It’s important to realize that your employees will gravitate towards whatever game and reward you emphasize, so it’s crucial to carefully select the behaviors you want to reward.
At the same time, if you only run one type of competition, the same high performers will keep rising to the top. A separate challenge is motivating the lower performing employees. This is addressed below. An additional approach of addressing this problem is by changing the highlighted game each week or each month, or running multiple games simultaneously. In order to encourage competition, you can implement a scrolling leaderboard that shows your employees who is the top scorer for each game at any time. Furthermore, it’s also important to diversify competition goals so that an employee can attain those
GETTING STARTED
WITH GAMIFICATION
It’s important to realize that your
employees will gravitate towards
whatever game and reward
you emphasize, so it’s crucial to
carefully select the behaviors you
want to reward.
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goals independently by competing against him or herself, regardless of how his or her colleagues perform. This means that the gamification platform also needs to indicate to the individual employee what his or her performance is compared to historical scores.
Of course, without awarding any kind of prize or recognition, gamification loses much of its impact. That’s why it’s
essential that you offer rewards that appeal to your agents. There are four main trends when it comes to rewards:
• Points: The employee is immediately awarded points for achieving the goal. These points can be turned into monetary rewards each week or pay period. For example, for every 100 points, an employee receives $10.
• Tokens: After successfully reaching an objective, the employee receives tokens to play another game where he or she can win points that can be turned into monetary rewards. For example, in one system, employees can choose whether to exit directly by means of an escalator, or by playing a point-winning game on a stairway whose steps function like the keys on a piano. In general, for every employee who took the escalator, 30 chose the stairway piano game. • Colleague tokens: Employees receive a certain
number of tokens that they can award to their peers in recognition of their performance. This encourages interaction and fosters collaboration between agents. • Badges: There’s a growing trend both in professional associations and in the gaming community to award top performers with badges that designate them as “top” in their field. For example, high performers can be awarded badges that show they’re top contributors or members of an elite group. These badges are powerful recognition tools that are becoming increasingly popular.
Note that a successful gamification program will include points, tokens, and badges in order to diversify the various motivational techniques that work for all kinds of performers. Addressing the bottom two-thirds of the staff who will seldom be top performers is another critical challenge oft ignored by most companies. One Canadian company, Allied International Credit, created a simple system to create improvement targets on key parameters for low performing employees in the bottom two-thirds of the team. It recognized when the employee met the target and acknowledged them within the same context as the top-performing employees in terms of gift points earned and recognition. Confidentiality on exact levels of performance is critical. You cannot label employees as “the best of the mediocre.”
Once the employee had met the improvement target, a higher target was set to achieve additional recognition. Also, the employee was invited to become a mentor to other lower performing employees. Becoming a mentor often fostered further improvement. Employees want to be successful and success usually breeds additional success! A key challenge is getting supervisors to focus on the middle vs. just the top and the bottom.
GETTING STARTED WITH GAMIFICATION
LESSONS LEARNED
After implementing gamification in a pilot program with eight different games, KellyConnect has pinpointed a number of lessons that can be learned from this process. First, the more dynamic a contact center, the more powerful the gamification tool needs to be in order to be effective. In a workplace with high turnover and a lack of stability, it’s more difficult to create a sense of community and friendly competition. In contrast, a stable environment is a much better fit for gamification. It builds a sense of community among contact center agents, plus, it encourages employees to interact, thereby building stronger ties among colleagues. Furthermore, it fosters a sense of loyalty to and engagement with your company. You can compare this process to how individuals who form gaming communities build friendships with their fellow gamers and are often very loyal to the game and/or the company that develops the game.
Second, new products and offerings keep the gamification process energized. Since contact center work is often repetitive in itself, it’s crucial to constantly offer a selection of fresh and exciting games. Think of competitions that keep agents incentivized to compete against themselves and their colleagues by demonstrating a high level of aptitude for new games, as well as offering enticing rewards. When the offerings are new and exciting, employees enjoy the journey to the goal more. Even if they don’t win, they experience more satisfaction with the process. At the same time, some companies integrate games with work in that as soon as a specific function is completed, it’s immediately followed by a game. KellyConnect, however, has avoided this approach in favor of voluntary contests and awards.
Third, management needs to ensure that gamification is in line with your company’s overall business objectives.
to work in, and increase employee loyalty to focus on and commit to the company brand. Therefore, all the different games need to facilitate and reward outstanding customer service and proficiency in technical skills. For example, if a game encourages agents to reduce the total time spent on a single call, this is only supportive of company objectives if the quality of customer service doesn’t suffer.
Fourth, it’s extremely important to establish critical monetary incentive goals and limits. Without adequate planning, you could be required to pay out unexpectedly high amounts that could send you over budget. Even if you’re offering tokens that can be put towards monetary vouchers such as a gift card to a restaurant, a movie theatre, or a reloadable debit card, you need to budget for the highest possible pay out. At the same time, awarding badges doesn’t cost anything—while still offering the recipients significant rewards in the form of peer recognition and satisfaction. And don’t forget the intangible rewards, like a shift preference, or an extended weekend off.
Fifth, the best attitudes amongst contact center agents were measured when they had a predetermined amount of points or tokens to work towards, e.g. 25 tokens equals a $25 gift card, 100 tokens equals a half vacation day, etc. Experience shows that when the potential rewards are clear, the anticipation of the reward functions as a strong motivator and helps improve performance.
GAMIFICATION VENDOR SELECTION PROCESS
When selecting a gamification vendor, it’s important to ensure the vendor has a good understanding of your business brand and objectives. This makes it possible for the vendor to strategize with you to determine which behaviors need to be encouraged and rewarded in order to yield
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A good vendor will require a detailed overview of your contact center environment, and it’s important that you witness their reactions to your contact center in order to make sure they have an accurate impression of the workplace. They will need to understand the current culture in order to know what to change. For example, they’ll want to make note of the level of competition that already exists between agents, as well as whether this is friendly or not. They’ll also need to understand the level of agent collaboration, the current quality of service, and typical call volume patterns. This information, combined with knowledge of your business brand and objectives, will help them guide you in how to structure your competitions. At the same time, your vendor needs to advise you of the pros and cons of incenting on specific behaviors. Incentives should encourage behaviors that improve the customer service experience and enhance engagement. They should never pose an obstacle to employees performing at their best. For example, if you decide to reward strong leaders for mentoring underperforming employees, you need to make sure the leaders don’t become frustrated due to the change in responsibilities. Remember, with many contact center employees fitting the same profile as gamers, satisfaction is more likely to come from achieving a high score than from filling an educational role.
Your vendor should be able to inform you about the best combination of points, tokens, and badges for your contact center. This will depend in large part on the culture of the workplace and where the focus lies in terms of high performance. If status is important, then an “elite” badge system can be the best method, while if numbers of successfully solved cases is important, then points or tokens can be the preferred incentive.
In addition, the gamification structure needs to strike a balance between top performance among colleagues and individual goal attainment, or competing against oneself.
While encouraging competition between colleagues is a highly effective way to improve performance, providing workers with an incentive to “beat their own best,” regardless of how they stack up against their coworkers, offers a satisfying method of enhancing individual performance. As a consequence, the implemented
gamification methods need to advance both of these goals carefully without leaning more to one or the other.
Finally, as Kyle Turco points out in his TechnologyAdvice
article “How to Select an Enterprise Gamification Vendor,” the gamification platform itself needs to meet certain requirements in order for it to be effective. It needs to be easy to install and integrate into the existing software, plus, it should be flexible enough to adapt as your company’s objectives shift. Moreover, if the platform provides analytics, that can add a powerful tool for your company to analyze a wide variety of statistics about your workforce.[2]
ACCURACY OF ACCOUNTING
Accurate accounting is a key factor in gamification, which is why your vendor needs to understand your budget, as well as how to keep track of rewards. Since incentives include both monetary bonuses as well as merchandise or prizes, the first step in this process is to determine the budget for gamification rewards as well as the cost for processing and fulfillment. Without setting a cap on rewards payouts, you can lose control over your budget and wind up spending far more than you planned for.
There are various ways to determine your gamification payout budget. One strategy is to shift some of the base incentive pay to the gamification rewards. Most companies allot a certain percent of the contact center’s overall compensation budget to incentive pay. Others also specify that rewards should be based on factor of one hour’s wages per month. In the pilot program, KellyConnect determined rewards to be between two and four hours’ wages per
month with some regular bonus pay still left intact. In addition to pay, effective alternatives to financial rewards are redeemable gift cards and reloadable debit cards.
One caveat to be aware of is that when calculating overtime pay for exempt employees, you’ll need to factor non-discretionary monetary rewards into the calculation of base pay. That means that if an employee earns $10 per hour but wins $100 in monetary rewards in a given week, his or her hourly rate for a 40-hour work week will be $12.50 per hour, thus driving up the calculation of overtime pay.
Once you’ve determined your budget, you need to communicate it to your vendor. After that, the onus lies on the vendor to accurately develop a rewards system that matches your budget, as well as a foolproof incentive payout tracking system.
BUSINESS BENEFITS OF GAMIFICATION
As this KellyConnect pilot program shows, there are three distinct benefits of gamification:
First, overall employee collaboration increases significantly. Team leads are able to create new individual team
incentives to excite their workers. According to Bob Marsh in his Inc. article “4 Benefits of Sales Gamification,” employees are encouraged to have a dialogue about
common challenges and what best practices can help resolve them. Daily feeds that show rewards and rankings function as an encouragement to both individuals and teams, giving agents a better understanding of their strong and weak points and inspiring them to seek guidance from top performers in order to improve.[3]
Second, simple games, as well as random awards, are popular and drive coworkers to compete. As a result, the workplace becomes much more exciting and employees experience more job satisfaction because they can see measurable results for their efforts.
Third, there’s lower absenteeism and attrition. Employees are more engaged and satisfied because they’re enjoying themselves more and have a more acute awareness of being rewarded for their efforts. Moreover, there’s a lower percentage of employees quitting due to an emotional response to an incident at work, since the rewards system encourages them to stay on till the end of a pay period, at which point the acuteness of the emotional response is oftentimes significantly lessened.
Gamification can be a useful strategy to motivate workers, so long as you keep your platform fresh by means of new games and attractive rewards in the form of points, tokens, or badges. In addition, you need to select a vendor who understands your contact center’s culture, as well as your company’s business objectives, in order to determine the right type and balance of games to incentivize workers. Your vendor should also understand the limits of your budget and provide an accurate method of tracking rewards. When these conditions are met and the platform is implemented correctly, gamification can be an effective tool to enhance employee collaboration and engagement, facilitate training, improve productivity, and reduce turnover.
SUMMARY
13 REFERENCES [1] http://data-informed.com/using-gamification-to-boost-performance-in-the-call-center/ [2] http://technologyadvice.com/gamification/blog/how-to-select-an-enterprise-gamification-vendor/ [3] http://www.inc.com/4-reasons-sales-gamification-works.html SOURCE http://data-informed.com/using-gamification-to-boost-performance-in-the-call-center/ http://technologyadvice.com/gamification/blog/how-to-select-an-enterprise-gamification-vendor/ http://www.inc.com/4-reasons-sales-gamification-works.htmlABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOHN GOODMAN is Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, [email protected], Twitter jgoodman888. His latest book is Customer Experience 3.0, published by AMACOM and available on Amazon. Customer Care Measurement & Consulting enables its clients to maximize their return on investment (ROI) for their efforts to improve the customer experience via quantifying the impact of potential strategies and assuring implementation using best practices.
JEFF CHRISTOFIS has more than 25 years of operational leadership experience and industry best practices knowledge within Customer Service, IT Help Desk, IT Service Management, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Lean Six Sigma®, Total Quality Management, and COPC®. Having served both
Manufacturing and Services industries, Jeff has managed all aspects of Contact Center operations and IT including infrastructure management. He currently is VP and Operations Lead for KellyConnect®, a BPO Contact Center and IT Help Desk
practice of Kelly Services®, with global operational responsibility for all outsourced
and internal client call center programs.
ABOUT KELLYOCG
KellyOCG®, the Outsourcing and Consulting Group of workforce solutions provider, Kelly
Services, is a global leader in integrated workforce solution delivery for clients worldwide, utilizing proven talent supply chain strategies. In addition to integrated solutions, KellyOCG specializes in Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Contingent Workforce Outsourcing (CWO), Talent Management Consulting, Career Transition and Executive Coaching & Development, and Executive Search.
KellyOCG was named to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals® 2015 Global Outsourcing 100® list, an annual ranking