Case Studies

Blake Collections Applies Game Mechanics to engage people and drive business growth.

Blake Collections (Blake) has more than 30 years of experience in debt recovery services. The South African organization’s scalable solutions cover the entire debt life cycle across a range of industries, including banking and finance, telecommunications, retail, medical, education, and business. Blake is transforming employee engagement with Centrical alongside our partner, Verint. The South African debt collection specialist is applying modern, innovative, game mechanics to communicate goals, measure success, and motivate staff.

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Improves employee engagement
Around 1,400 learning missions have been completed by agents across all campaigns, including 600 quizzes. And 2,400+ performance challenges have been completed.
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Enhances visibility
Previously, any visibility into coaching was manual. The Team Leader would walk the contact center looking for answers. Now, it’s all available in a dashboard giving them the ability to identify areas of weakness, see completed coaching, and understand how coaching was received.
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Increases efficiency
Leverages game mechanics to help employees develop and maintain desired skills, knowledge, and behaviors to achieve organizational performance goals.
“Centrical and Verint are flexible, enabling us to easily cope with the different cycle dates. “For example, bank clients might want to engage between the first and the 31st of the month, whereas retail clients will work on different days of each month. It also enables us to adapt to different KPIs. For example, at the start of the month, we can focus on KPIs associated with the volume of arrangement. We can then switch to KPIs focused on tracing, then later to KPIs associated with broken promises to pay.”

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Gamification that Motivates

Blake Collections used to perform racetrack metrics to monitor and communicate people performance. However, they always been keen to introduce a gamification platform. An early attempt to build such a platform in-house was quickly found to be complex and expensive. In addition, it took development resources away from other key business priorities. That’s when they found Centrical through our partner, Verint.

Scale Employee Performance

As a leading debt collection company, Blake has approximately 80 campaigns in motion at any time. In the first 90 days of a debt being due, Blake contacts customers via outbound calling from the contact center. Thereafter, the team switches identity, communicating as a registered debt collection agency. Game theory is applied to KPIs, the terminology used by agents, cycle data, and other metrics. The gamification solution has expanded to 50 production/performance KPIs and is run by one super user and five admin users. We also provide flexibility in Blake’s incentives programs. For example, it’s common to find the same agents being incentivized each month for their performance. However, we enable the team to target the middle-tier of performers, or help the new hires move forward successfully. ”Blake Bucks” is one of the incentive programs geared to capturing employee interest while helping build desired skills and behaviors. Successful agents receive restaurant vouchers and other relevant incentives to foster team building.

“It’s about inspiring collaboration and empowering a people-centric organization,” says Holding. “We’re shifting the process of skills development from a routine chore into an exciting and competitive experience. We want people to perform more calls while being as caring as possible during each customer engagement.”

Approach

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Simplifies operations Helps Blake transform performance management exercises into an engaging experience for individuals and teams.
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Drives flexibility Supports different KPIs in a balanced scorecards approach to deliver challenging, yet entertaining simulations. For example, being able to incentivize the middle-tier of performers or help the new hires progress quickly.
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Increases agility Provides the benefits of a cloud solution by going live quickly, at low risk, and with minimal ongoing maintenance or upgrades.
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Results

  1. Improved Employee engagement
  2. Complete, automated visibility into. Coaching
  3. Employees are enabled to develop desired skills, knowledge, and behaviors
“Collections contact center environment isn’t easy. We only invest in technology that provides a proven return on investment. Make no mistake, we have achieved a great return on investment from Centrical and Verint Gamification.”

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