If you’re a manager within a sizable workforce, you’ve likely heard of gamification. This new type of technology has completely revolutionised the way training and management is conducted throughout the professional careers of your agents.
While gamification has only been around for a short time and used by large scale organisations, a growing wave of smaller workplaces appear to be adopting this technology in recent years. Gamification isn’t anywhere near as expensive as it used to be, especially with more industry-specific companies focusing on providing accessible solutions. It’s now easier than ever to integrate this technology into your contact centre with immediate and impressive results.
The commitment to gamification technology from companies worldwide is incredible, as more companies place a greater emphasis on employee development. The gamification industry had a US $9.1 billion market size in 2020 and is expected to grow at an average rate of 27.4% per year until 2025.
Here are some reasons why companies worldwide are choosing to invest in gamification and incorporating them into their training and development programs:
Encourages Ongoing Development
One of the best ways to build agent engagement is to offer continuous training and development, showing that growth and promotion are always on the horizon. Performance tends to drop when people feel that they are in a rut and not developing further.
Investing in gamification enables agents to undergo a more engaging form of training, encouraging them to develop further through their professional careers. 74% of employees believe a lack of continuous training is their most significant hurdle to reaching their full potential, demonstrating the void that gamification can help fill.
Agents that have been with you for a longer time possess a significant amount of knowledge and are more critical in the future development of your contact centre. For this reason, developing a continuous, concise and engaging training plan across an agent’s career lifespan is just as important as their initial training. An investment into gamification for ongoing training is a direct investment to growing the depth of knowledge in your contact centre.
Builds Engagement
Because certain aspects of the contact centre industry can become quite numbers-driven and repetitive, managers cannot understate the value in building agent engagement through alternative means such as gamification and non-work-related activities.
Gamification presents a whole new world of engagement. 83% of employees who undergo gamified training are more motivated at work, bringing instant improvement to several baseline KPIs. Humans naturally tend to respond higher to visual movements rather than static reading or listening to an audio presentation, and it’s this behavioural pattern that gamification appeals to, and how engagement is built.
Offers A Change of Pace
Incorporating gamification into your contact centre as part of a continuous development plan allows the pace of an agent’s work to vary. Because functions within the contact centre industry are very time focused and micromanaged, agents are more susceptible to burnout. Altering pace and tasks for agents is another means to building employee engagement.
Variation is all that’s commonly needed to build engagement. It might be taking an unexpected day off, a surprise work lunch or some other means of changing up the work cycle. While all of these tasks to build engagement are cards a manager can play, they all deviate from getting work done. Gamification alternatively allows for variation in workplace activities whilst remaining on task and providing some direct benefit to the contact centre. A survey by TalentLMS shows that 49% of employees tend to get bored with non-gamification training, illustrating that rote learning can be counter-intuitive due to its low engagement.
Better Training Results
Gamification based training appeals to a large base of learning styles and makes for higher engagement due to requiring input from the user. It’s this interactive mode of engagement in gamification that allows agents to receive, digest, and store more information than by other training methods.
Gamification has been highly effective at teaching and assisting agents at storing information, so much so that participants who use gamification as part of their training score on average 14% higher in skill-based assessments than those who don’t.
Demonstrates A Commitment to Your Employees
A significant factor in building employee engagement comes from the earnt respect of senior management. By managers showing they care about their agents, agents are more likely to reciprocate this level of care and feel more motivated in the workplace. This symbiotic relationship is what helps drive the achievement of KPIs and enhances employee engagement.
As most agents are looking for progression and development, an investment in gamification demonstrates a commitment to agent development, resulting in stronger performance and increased engagement. Agents value continuous training and engagement from their managers so much that in a survey, 94% of employees admitted they would stay at a company longer if they had invested in their professional development.
Building engagement as a contact centre manager is no easy feat, especially when external turbulence can impact an agent’s work performance. Whilst there are many tactics available to managers to build engagement and stimulate agents, no other solution keeps them on task and as engaged as gamification. Should you seek to develop engagement within your contact centre using gamification, speak to one of our expert consultants today.