Okay, first off, I hate the term gamification. It turns making your workplace, call center, sales department, or whatever, a fun place to work into some corporate idea, it just sounds stuffy to me. It’s like telling our agents that “we’re going to use this new concept to motivate and change your behavior.” Well forget that, for lack of a better term, I’m just going to call it playing games.
Why I Play Games?
In the customer service department call center I oversee, we play games for a number of reasons:
- To have fun
- To break the monotony
- To make the workplace more enjoyable
- To reward
- To motivate
- To produce results
Yes, these are the reasons why we play games in order of importance. I believe if you have 1,2, and 3 as the ultimate goal, then 4 and 5 come naturally. If your sole purpose is to produce results and motivate, then I don’t think the games will be as fun.
Anyone who has sat on the phones for 8 hours a day, with two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch, knows that it can be the most tiresome and tedious job. In my call center, we are inbound with an emphasis on offering exceptional service on every interaction. In January 2015, we had the following results in our Customer Satisfaction Survey (this is how we look pretty much all the time):
- First Contact Resolution: 85%
- Ease of Reaching Us: 93% satisfied or very satisfied
- Friendliness of Agent: 99% satisfied or very satisfied
- Ability to Answer Questions Thoroughly: 99% satisfied or very satisfied
- Would recommend us to a friend or family member: 92% likely or very likely
- Overall Satisfaction: 96% satisfied or very satisfied
Our stats weren’t always this way. Before I started with my current company, I had been using games long before the word gamification came around to motivate employees in a fun way. However, by using games to create a fun work place, we were able to get the agents involved and give them a break. All the games we play in our department can be done for under $200 a month. Since we are a customer service department, there is very little sales, however, there are some products that our agents can upsell, but they are soft sales (nothing bothers me more than calling a company because I have a problem and being sold on a bunch of other products or services).
Most, if not all the games we play here, were developed using this thought process. We’ve had a few duds, but many have been successful and are some of my agents really look forward to certain ones, particularly Zombie Hunting in October. So, when deciding on a game here is the thought process I use with my two other supervisors.
- Come up with an idea of something that would be fun
- Determine what would determine the winners (I love thinkgeek.com for prizes, we don’t do gift cards)
- Decide what we are going to focus on (sometimes this is #1 if we see an area of improvement)
- How long do we run the game (2 weeks is the max, otherwise people lose interest)
Once we have those done, we hash out the final details, like scoring, the actual prizes, etc. Once we get all this done.
Increasing Participation
One common attribute that my games have is everyone has a chance of winning and participating. It seems most call center always have that top percentage that wins at everything if the contest is a winner take all. Usually after a few days, they pull into the lead with whatever game or contest you’re doing and the other 75%+ of the call center just gives up. So, my games revolve around keeping everyone involved, while still rewarding the top performers.
So, that is why I play games and not gamification contests.Have fun, make the game fun, make the contest fun, or do whatever to make it fun. If you do that, then the results and motivation will come naturally and you will have a better call center with lower attrition.
Call Center Fun 