Make a Game of It: How Gamification Can Help the Contact Centre

How gamification in the contact centre can improve your customer service.

Ever experience one of those ‘aha’ moments when you realize that a tedious task can be way more fun if you make a game out of it? Gamification — a relatively new concept as applied to contact centres and customer service — does just that. By applying game principles to the contact centre experience, agents and customers alike may enjoy the customer service experience that much more — without the need to pass Go and collect $200.

What Is Gamification?

Gamification is the use of game thinking applied to non-game activities. For instance, if you were to reward your child with a sticker each time they cleaned their room, you would be engaging in gamification. Chances are, most parents have ‘gamified’ one activity or another at some point during their children’s upbringing.

Gamification works because we like games, clear and simple. But what’s really behind the psychological effects of gamification is that we enjoy being motivated to do something. Without motivation, there is no reason to act. Gamification, at its most basic level, provides that motivation.

How Does Gamification Apply to the Contact Centre?

There are several possible applications of gamification in the contact centre. You can use game tactics to not only motivate agents to perform their best, but also to enrich the client experience.

• Try rewarding customers for waiting on hold. Nothing irritates a customer more than being put on hold and feeling like they’ve been forgotten, but if you can encourage the customer to associate the experience of being on hold with something positive, you may have just kept a customer from changing brands. All it takes is a simple program, like “Tweet Your Way to Savings” by American Express, that rewards customers on hold with special messages and hashtags, which they can then use to earn ‘points.’
• The benefits of self-service for both the customer and the contact centre cannot be understated. To encourage your customers to make use of self-service channels, reward those who use self-service with redeemable points, special discounts, or whatever kind of recognition your brand can offer.
• You can also measure the performance of your agents using gamified software. Gamified software can compile your own analytics to show you how quickly agents respond to customer contact, how long customers wait on hold, how many channels customers go through before their problem is resolved and how long the agent takes the resolve the issue. Contact centres can publish a weekly or monthly list of the best performing agents, keeping spirits high among top performers and even inspiring a sense of friendly competition.

What Are the Benefits of Gamification in the Contact Centre?

With the right application, there are many potential benefits of gamification in the contact centre. According to research by Gallup, the cost of disengaged employees falls between $450 and $550 billion dollars each year. If gamifying the workplace can enthuse agents about their job, gamification just might be the secret to contact centre success.

Here are a few other interesting potential benefits to gamification:

• Improved knowledge about your services or products: When you make a game out of learning everything about your company that agents are expected to know, you might find that they retain the information better and can better answer customer inquiries.
• Better customer service: Gamifying the workplace often has the effect of calming agents and making them more receptive to client’s emotions.
• Increased customer loyalty: If your agents and customers are having fun, customers will be more loyal to your brand. Better brand loyalty also means they’ll be more likely to share their experience with others, becoming brand ambassadors.

By using gamification tactics in the contact centre, you can effectively improve agent performance, encourage agent engagement, increase customer satisfaction and promote loyalty to your brand. To learn more about gamification in the contact centre, download our free white paper.