How does employee experience impact business performance?
A positive employee experience helps drive the success of a company, from both a financial and social point of view.
I grew up with a brother who loved video games. Through him, I was exposed to the world of Duck Hunt, Capcom vs SNK, and the Legend of Zelda. I used to play Sims on my home computer, sucking up all the memory on my windows 98 operating system as I created a virtual world.
I’d plant crops and buy cows acting as a farmer while playing Harvest moon on my Nintendo DS. I was introduced to a world of catching Pokemon way before Pokemon Go was a thing.
By the time I entered college, I left the gamer in me behind thinking its addictive qualities would not serve me well in college or the professional world. Yet, lately gaming has come to my mind again.
Whether you have ever been into video games or not, you cannot deny the addictive qualities in video games. Now those addictive qualities are being leveraged to create a more productive workforce.
The recognition of a job well done, completing a stage, and moving to the next level, or competing with others to top the leaderboards can now be used to incentivize a workforce.
Gamification: The process of adding games or game-like elements to encourage participation
Companies are now recognizing the benefits of unlocking the inner gamer in their employees to create a more productive and efficient workforce. This is a difficult concept to consume when many of us have grown up with our parents saying how games are a time waster and will rot our brains.
Gamification concepts have been talked about in length as a marketing or sales technique, but what benefits can gamification have on your service organization? What is the benefit to adding gamification to track service performance?
Gamification productivity: Benefits to the call center agents
Call center agents tend to be the unglorified middlemen in companies. They’re huge influencers in the overall customer experience, but they carry most of the grief and burden of the customer journey.
In this kind of environment, it’s easy to breed employees who are unmotivated and find limited satisfaction in their work. These conditions lead to high employee turnover.
Introducing gamification methods into the call center can increase agent development and productivity by incentivizing agents to be more productive:- Who topped the leaderboard on lowest abandonment rate?
- Who has the highest first call resolution time?
- Who has the greatest customer satisfaction score?
When an agent has clear visibility into their performance in relation to their peers, it motivates them to work harder.
Having visible rewards and recognition for a job well done incentivizes employees to continue to correct performance and do better. When your service agents are empowered with the knowledge and data to meet their goals and exceed call center KPIs in real time, they are motivated to improve their performance and top the leaderboard.
Benefits to the manager
One of the number one areas of frustration for call center managers is lack of visibility into their team’s service performance. Within call centers, it can be difficult for managers to understand how well agents are performing in comparison to each other.
By introducing gamification techniques into the call center, managers gain a living document on agent performance. This can be used to help reward high performers as well as recognize low performers who may need more training.
This allows managers to be able to leverage data in a real way and do more accurate performance reviews.
Gamification can also remove the perception of favoritism for one agent over another since everyone’s performance is clearly recorded and displayed. When you use gamification to know who has exceeded his targets and reward agents’ accordingly, it helps build agent morale. This leads to better motivation, more productivity in turning over tickets and in turn, happier customers.
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Benefits to the customer
As a customer, I am sure when we have experiences with poor customer service we wonder, how is their performance measured? When we get those surveys to give feedback on our experiences, we ask, does it really make a difference?
Adding gaming elements to a call center increases the importance of customer feedback and the timeliness of employees’ responses. It adds another level of ownership and urgency on correcting performance. This equals higher case and ticket turnover. Agents are suddenly motivated and incentivized to make their customers’ happier.
Happier customers lead to increased loyalty, and a more profitable call center.
