Contact Center Gamification - All You Need to Know

Your contact center is the window into your brand for many of your current and future customers. How your company is perceived (and its overall success) is often a function of the efficiency and effectiveness of your contact center.  

Whether it’s outbound prospecting, fielding support calls, or everything in between, investing in your contact center can pay dividends across your major metrics and KPIs. One proven way to turbocharge contact center agent productivity and performance is through gamification. 

We’ll take a deeper look at contact center gamification and practical ways that you can make an impact, including when it comes to agents’ productivity. 

What is contact center gamification? 

Contact center gamification is defined as the use of game mechanics – such as earning rewards or advancing through levels – applied to a contact center environment. In this context, the application is intended to elevate the employee experience for contact center agents. Contact center gamification can be used to improve all aspects and touch points within a call center, from onboarding to ongoing learning and long-term employee retention.   

Gamification can take the form of an exciting racing game or dynamic leaderboards that pit teams or individuals against each other in a fun and engaging way. It can also be about earning badges, collecting coins, or embarking on a personalized gamified journey based on a contact center agent’s unique KPIs.  

In short, contact center gamification takes what could be a dry environment, and injects motivation, a sense of purpose, and friendly competition – making the contact center an engaging (and productive!) place to work. 

How call center gamification boosts productivity 

Gallup data shows that business environments with a highly engaged workforce demonstrate 14%-18% higher productivity than those with a disengaged workforce. And one of the best ways to boost engagement is through gamification.  

Contact center gamification increases engagement by giving employees a fun, challenging way to track and achieve their goals. Employees are more motivated, and their personal and company goals can be aligned using the right gamification dynamics.  

Peer recognition and rewards further boost engagement, as do gamified feedback and guided performance improvement. Ultimately, contact center gamification enables employees to feel that they are part of something bigger, something more exciting and inspiring. All of this serves to directly boost productivity.  

Benefits of call center gamification software 

There are multiple benefits for enterprises when implementing contact center gamification. In addition to increased contact center agent productivity, contact center gamification can: 

Boost performance  

Contact center gamification provides personalized goals, guided performance improvement, actionable coaching, and performance-driven microlearning. 

Drive cultural transformation 

Cut down on attrition, engage agents in company culture, create a clear path for growth, and align personal and company goals. 

Improve time to proficiency 

Onboard new agents faster and get them up to speed and fully set up quickly to immediately provide value. 

Attract and retain talent 

Contact center gamification software can elevate an environment, ensuring that people want to work there, and stay working there because they feel challenged, fulfilled, and excited to come to work every day. 

Want to learn more? Have a quick preview.  

How to implement gamification in the contact center workflow 

There are several areas in the contact center workflow where gamification can be implemented:  

Gamify the onboarding process 

For any new contact center agent, the onboarding process can be daunting. There are materials to read, videos to watch, lectures to attend, and every company has a different way of doing things.  

With contact center gamification, the onboarding experience can be both fun and memorable. Instead of being intimidated, new agents can enjoy the gamified onboarding experience, and by extension start off as more effective employees.  

Create rewards for top-performing agents 

Gamification rewards have been linked to chemical reactions in the brain and can serve to increase motivation, among other positive, business-beneficial effects. Using gamification, top-performing agents can be recognized and rewarded, and further motivated to keep improving.  

Rewards can be in the form of badges, leveling up, coins, or even other virtual rewards that can be exchanged for real-world items like company swag.   

Increase performance without increasing compensation packages 

It’s easy to think of the compensation package lever first when you want better results from your contact center team. Gamification, however, can be an even more effective tool when it comes to getting better results.   

Effective techniques and tips: make the gamification process successful  

There are proven tips and techniques to make the gamification process successful. Some of these include: 

Personalize 

Leading contact center gamification platforms allow you to personalize the narrative, KPIs, and game journey for your contact center employees. Personalization results in much higher engagement rates, and increased platform usage. Following this is increased focus and accountability, driving and rewarding the right behaviors, and team members pulling in the right direction.  

Communicate 

To create a successful gamification process, it’s important to communicate the goals of the process to team members. You can explain that this is a tool that can make work more fun, meaningful, and engaging – a message that is appreciated by employees.  

Create healthy competition 

Nothing gets people invested like healthy competition, whether it is an individual against themselves or others. Elements like leaderboards and badges are crucial tools in a successful gamification process (but you shouldn’t stop there). Leading gamification platforms are built in such a way that competition isn’t toxic, but rather is fun and light-hearted, while still driving the desired results.  

Management support 

Your enterprise’s contact center gamification platform should be seen as a regular part of your employees’ day, and therefore should be a key part of conversations within the team and beyond. For example, reference can be made to leaderboards at all-hands meetings, and top performers within the gamified platform can be acknowledged.  

Use Case: How gamification can improve customer experience in the call center 

In a recent use case, Microsoft used gamification within call centers to drive desired behaviors. Quality at Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) can fluctuate, so Microsoft launched its “Making Agents Great” initiative – part of which was the usage of gamification within call centers. 

Dee Nilles, who led the gamification program, notes: “We wanted to find a solution that would help engage our agents at a deeper and more meaningful level.  One way to motivate people is to present them with practical challenges, encourage them, and to get them emotionally engaged to achieve their very best.” 

Microsoft leveraged several gamification initiatives, including deploying leaderboards throughout sites, on the production floor, in the breakrooms, and in the elevator waiting areas. 

The results were spectacular: an annual return on investment in the millions, an increase in productivity of 10%, a reduction in absenteeism of 12%, improved knowledge, and crucially, improved customer satisfaction.  

This example of gamification call center success shows that gamification can drive powerful results in organizations of any size. 

Centrical solutions for implementing gamification in your contact center 

Centrical offers the leading solution for contact center gamification. The platform helps engage, motivate, and enable call center agents (wherever they may be situated) using gamified goals, personalized microlearning, guided feedback, and more.  

Centrical clients have been shown to enjoy a 12% increase in productivity, a 15% increase in CSAT and FCR scores, and a massive 30% reduction in early attrition. To see Centrical in action, you can check out a preview here. 

Key features of the Centrical contact center gamification platform include: 

Guided performance management 

Drive ongoing improvement and by leveraging performance data across your EX ecosystem. With Centrical, you can create gamified KPIs that are tied to personalized microlearning and augmented coaching. 

Recognize and reward 

Use Centrical’s peer and manager kudos, milestone badges, points system, and redeemable rewards to recognize and reward agents while motivating them to continuously improve.  

Gamification with purpose 

Centrical’s user-friendly interface with its advanced technology enables focus and accountability, drives the right behaviors, and builds team culture. Leverage progressing game narratives, increasingly challenging levels, individual and team competitions, dynamic leaderboards, and other powerful tools to drive key business outcomes.  

Make it your own 

With easy content authoring, you can create and deploy content quickly, especially in constantly evolving environments. From learning missions to quizzes, and simulations to continuous coaching, every agent benefits and no one gets left behind.  

Grow and connect with employees 

An often-neglected relationship is the agent-manager dynamic. Now you can strengthen this force with gamified real-time coaching, social recognition, knowledge sharing, and continuous, AI-powered feedback.  

Contact center gamification software: final thoughts 

Implementing gamification in contact centers is a sure way to boost performance and see an uplift across key metrics. In this article, we’ve looked at what contact center gamification is, how to implement gamification effectively, valuable tips and techniques, a real-life use case, and how Centrical offers an all-in-one solution for contact center gamification. Below are a few key takeaways: 

• Contact center gamification can be used to improve touch points within a call center throughout the employee lifecycle, from onboarding to learning to long-term employee retention. 
• Engaged employees have higher productivity than disengaged employees. Contact center gamification helps keep agents engaged and motivated to perform well. 
• Gamifying processes accelerates time to proficiency for new hires, raises agent motivation, increases customer satisfaction, and reduces attrition (including early attrition). 
• Personalization, communication, healthy competition, and enabling stronger management support enable contact center gamification success.  
• For over a decade, Centrical has partnered with enterprise contact centers across the globe to increase agent engagement, motivation, performance, and customer satisfaction.  

To learn more about Centrical for contact centers – including how the platform drives employee engagement, performance, and growth for the world’s leading contact centers – book yourself a free demo now.