How a Gamification Strategy Can Improve CX in the Contact Centre
Gamification can massively improve your contact centre employees’ work experience. It puts them in a position to be more goal-orientated and engaged in their job. A 2019 survey from TalentLMS showed that 89% of employees felt more productive, and 88% felt happier at work due to gamification. Employees want and enjoy gamification as it motivates them and makes their job more enjoyable. There are many ways to add gamification to the employee experience, from interactive training modules to performance challenges.
If you link gamification to your Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme, you can reward employees based on customer feedback. They can gain badges or points as they hit specific targets or go a certain amount of time without detractors. Track the top employees’ performance on a leaderboard, and everyone will be itching to get to the top! You can even create some healthy competition amongst teams so that everyone works collaboratively towards a goal of a collectively high NPS or FCR score.
Games aren’t just for kids, so applying gamification principles to your CX strategy in your contact centre can be a really enjoyable way to increase engagement and satisfaction for your agents. Below we discuss opportunities to introduce gamification to your contact centre to improve customer experience.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is a strategy used to add elements of game playing and design to non-gaming settings. Adding game-like features to existing settings can bring about increased engagement from existing employees and improve the customer experience of your brand. There are so many different ways to introduce gaming principles to your business, and it can work in any sector. You can create competitions amongst customers or employees, giving them opportunities to earn badges and rewards or simply introducing a bit of fun at different touchpoints.
It can make the employee experience more interesting if you create challenges or opportunities to gain rewards for your teams and staff members. Employee engagement and motivation are essential to how customers feel about your business, so using gamification amongst agents can be another effective way to use game design strategies to improve CX.
Gamifying Your Contact Centre
Goal-Oriented
Be very specific about what you plan to achieve by gamifying CX in your contact centre. Identify the quantitative metrics you hope to improve and the scores you are aiming for before you start. This level of specificity in your plan will give agents something to work toward as they interact with customers. Whether NPS, FCR, CES, or any other popular contact centre KPI is what you’re aiming for, setting targets, goals and ideal outcomes will be essential. These can affect every part of your strategy, from the game’s design to the type of user data tracked.
Healthy Competition
For gamification to be successful and worthwhile, you need a high level of engagement. Fostering an environment of healthy and fair competition will motivate employees to get on board and actively participate in the module you set up. Not only rewarding the highest performer and never penalising low performers are essential parts of a gamification strategy to keep any rivalry lighthearted. If animosities grow, it can undermine any goals you may have set out and the overall performance of your contact centre. Consider rewarding collaboration and teamwork as part of your gamification model to prevent employees from working against each other to get to the top.
Reporting
How you track and report will ultimately make or break your gamification strategy. First, you need to be transparent and fair. Reporting is essential to help your agents understand where they stand and where they need to aim. It also helps to report results in real-time to make the gaming element more engaging and competitive. Without sophisticate, robust reporting on metrics and individual results, you won’t be able to understand if the gamification is driving the business goals you hoped to achieve. All of this requires integrations with your contact centre infrastructure and voice of the customer solution so that the reporting can be done as the customer interactions happen.
Feedback
There are two kinds of feedback essential to a successful gamification strategy: customer feedback and employee feedback. Customer feedback on agent performance includes useful indicators such as NPS and CES to boost agent competition and engagement. You should encourage as much customer feedback as possible, so incentivising customers to respond to surveys is a good idea to get more data on agent performance.
Employee feedback, on the other hand, will let you know if your gamification strategy is working. Ask them what elements they enjoy or don’t enjoy, what kinds of rewards or prizes they would like to see, and ideas to improve the gamification experience. Not only will this increase employee investment and involvement, but it will also improve the game as new players get involved.
