5 Powerful Capabilities of Gamification
Gamification is one of the most effective methods for contact centres to develop an engaging learning experience for employees to learn new skills and connect their actions to business outcomes. By encouraging workplace competition and collaboration, you can help agents improve productivity levels, produce a greater quality of work, and accurately achieve company goals and objectives.
Gamification learning connects employees to business goals with progress bars, leader boards, and quick and easy learning that rewards achievements. According to recent studies, gamification has helped contact centres improve employee motivation by as much as 83% and productivity by 89%. Many valuable capabilities of gamification software relate to Gen Z and future generations like never before, reinforcing technology's power and underlying capabilities in contact centres. Let’s explore five significant capabilities of gamification in more detail:
- Builds Employee Engagement
A recent study by McKinsey identified that engaged contact centre employees are 8.5 times more likely to stay at an organisation than leave within their first year. Happy agents are more likely to provide customers with a better experience therefore focusing on their engagement is important. Providing incentives and team competition can help keep engagement and motivation levels high.
- Encourages Agent Development
According to the 2022 Smaart Recruitment Contact Centre Best Practice report, 56% of agents want to follow a career path towards either a specialised role in the contact centre or stay with the organisation but in a different area. By offering continuous training and development of staff, the likelihood of people staying with the organisation is much higher. Gamification can be used to help develop staff skills and enable them to strive towards new goals. The longer they stay with the organisation, the better it is therefore investing in their development is key.
- Empowers Employees
Providing your employees with a sense of advancement and purpose can be achieved with regular personal development and upskilling. The introduction of gamification can help build a competitive and entertaining element to training programs that might otherwise be perceived as boring. Gamification’s ability to maintain employee motivation by setting new goals to strive towards and building on existing and new skills should not be overlooked.
When agents feel empowered and engaged, they provide a higher quality of service which makes the entire customer interaction a better experience. The same goes for celebrating the success of agents, employees feel appreciated and empowered.
- Shows Commitment to Teams
When management provides support and a level of care to agents, employees are more likely to reciprocate with a higher quality of work. By recognising staff and providing them with this support using the gamification tools, it shows the organisation is committed to their staff.
- Provides Performance Insights
Another benefit of gamification is its ability to provide performance insights. Team leaders and management can easily see who is meeting targets and who needs some additional coaching and training.
If you are looking for new ways to create sustainable changes that are going to positively impact your staff performance and engagement, gamification is the solution for your business. Contact our friendly team at Call Design today.
How to Use Gamification to Engage Remote Teams
Disconnected? Disinterested? Not sure how everything fits anymore? These are often the sentiments expressed as working from home employees reshuffle pandemic style and adapt. Those who have worked at home know how hard it is to remain motivated and attentive throughout the entire day. Managers looking to mitigate these added challenges can seek solutions to help staff adapt to the environment and increase engagement and motivation.
The declining efficiency of hybrid models and remote teams is costing thousands of businesses millions every year in productivity. In a recent study, 25% of recipients found their virtual teams were not fully productive. As the pandemic shows no end in sight, operations managers need to employ solutions such as gamification to boost productivity.
So how does gamification help? Here are ways contact centres can harness the power of gamification to boost performance and engagement in remote teams.
- Improve Employee Retention
The job market within Australia is becoming difficult to navigate, with the number of staff outweighing the number of people looking for work. While many companies report substantial revenue increases, they cannot grow their workforce as required. In addition to this, the cost of onboarding is substantial. To combat this, keeping staff engaged and happy at work so that they stay is important. Gamification can help with this. One association that was able to highlight this is where a renowned provider of merchant processing services—Sekure Merchant implemented Alvaria Motivate. The company averages 120,000+ outbound calls a day and needed an intuitive solution to improve operational efficiency and agent and team leader productivity on essential key performance indicators across all employee levels. Alvaria created four distinct user interfaces that aligned features to each level of Sekure Merchant’s organisational hierarchy. The solution was aimed at clearly and quantifiably displaying goals for each agent, team leader and manager. With Alvaria Motivate, the company witnessed more transparency in realizing their goals and could also achieve improved management efficiency. For every 100 agents, they gained 10 hours of management efficiency per week. Additionally, they realized a 62 percent increase in employee retention. The company is now unifying all their motivational management activities through a single interface.
- Ability to Refine Employee Training
Training new employees is difficult when working remotely. Teaching through screensharing and phone calls limits an agent’s ability to learn and fully absorb all the information. Using gamification in the training process helps to keep staff more engaged and motivated, ultimately leading to a better customer experience.
Utilising gamification software is an adaptive and engaging way to portray information to stimulate human senses. Many of Australia's largest contact centres have opted to use gamification-based training to improve engagement and employee retention as well as combat challenges associated with working from home.
- Increase Engagement to Boost Performance
Engagement is arguably one of the biggest challenges associated with staff working from home and is a key driving factor of productivity within a contact centre. Successful contact centres that constantly look for new ways to improve engagement and reach KPIs have directed their attention towards gamification.
Team Leaders can make training more engaging, which yields lower training costs and a better customer experience. The data also provides insight into what rewards agents want and what support they need to stay engaged and meet goals.
Gamification has become the choice amongst many large and small contact centres as adapting to the new macro-environment is a top priority to drive productivity. As everyone in the contact centre continues to adjust to changing work restrictions, gamification software presents the most cost-effective and interactive method to boost engagement and performance.
If you are looking for additional ways to manage remote teams effectively, contact our expert consultants at Call Design today. We can help your contact centre grow to new heights.
Why Contact Centres Must Accelerate Their Digital Transformation Strategies
A new wave of technology adoption is closing the gap in contact centre operations and shaping how agents perform on a day-to-day basis. While older, legacy systems are common, many contact centres are adopting new digital strategies to elevate productivity and manage unpredicted surges in call volume. Delivering a personalised customer service experience is also critical to cater to customer preferences which can be achieved much easier by implementing the latest and greatest technology rather than trying to use workarounds in some of the older systems.
Solutions such as IVRs, intelligent automation, Workforce Engagement Management, and the relative ease of implementing cloud-based applications have empowered contact centres to increase efficiency despite the current climate. Various studies have illustrated that companies who were able to excel through the pandemic were those who accelerated their digital transformation strategy and ultimately reaped the rewards.
The market for providing a high-quality customer experience has become increasingly difficult in recent years. Due to the expansive growth of e-commerce and the currently tight Australian labour market, contact centres are receiving more and more workload with a smaller workforce, requiring contact centre agents to work at much higher efficiencies.
The prevalence of Omicron has also highlighted that reduced numbers of agents requires better technology and systems to help cater for the workload when people unexpectedly call in sick.
Greater Flexibility
While restrictions within Australia differ from state-to-state and continuously change, employing flexible workplace management models has proven to be the most effective course of action. Managing people from home or in the office, and keeping rosters up to date can be very challenging. While these workplace arrangements allow the service process to remain uninterrupted through change, the amount of administration required to run such an operation takes managers' attention away from big-ticket items, such as customer satisfaction scores, and agent engagement.
Technology solutions allow managers to automate much of their administrative tasks and focus on contact centre strategy execution. Tools such as intelligent automation that work with your workforce management solution to process changes as soon as they need to happen are among the more valuable improvements a contact centre can make to their operational efficiency.
Better Support Agents
Growing a workforce at the same rate as the demand for digital customer service is a difficult, if not impossible task, which is why agents are being asked to take on more types of contact and work at higher efficiencies than ever before. By increasing the workload beyond a certain level, burnout becomes inevitable and eventually feeds a growing employee turnover rate. With all agent performance, there is a sustainable level at which agents perform at their best without burning out.
By employing technology solutions that support agents with their workload, contact centres can raise the sustainable threshold without increasing the risk of burnout. Solutions such as IVR systems and Intelligent Automation allow basic tasks to be simplified or handled by a computer. IVRs can handle simple calls and Intelligent automation can be used to help staff immediately they need it and keep their schedules up to date. Effectively delegating this work allows agents to focus on more critical elements of the customer experience rather than simple data entry.
Analyse Customer Service at a Higher Degree
Improving the customer service quality has traditionally been a game of subjective analysis by team leaders or quality analysts. Without the use of technology, a contact centre manager can only analyse the CX performance of one agent at a time, and to the personal preference of that manager. This conventional approach to improving the customer service experience makes improvements stagnant, thereby hindering the ability for companies to grow.
Quality Management software helps agents improve the customer service experience on the go and to the preference of both the customer and the contact centre manager.
By infusing the knowledge of contact centre managers and the quantitative capabilities of software, contact centres can refine their customer service delivery to a much higher degree.
Efficiently Manage Workforces
Ensuring that labour costs do not blow out, break times are optimised, and agents are engaged and managed effectively is hard to achieve on a large scale. A very traditional approach to workforce management involves using excel spreadsheets (particularly in small centres) and only uncovering performance issues reactively rather than proactively.
Technology solutions such as Alvaria WFM allow contact centre managers to analyse performance data and make real-time adjustments as required. Problems can be identified promptly, and changes can be made before they negatively affect the bottom line. This enables workforce managers to fine-tune schedules to provide a more efficient contact centre operation.
Build Workplace Aligned Engagement
Having an engaged workforce is important for contact centres to remain relevant to the current market. Due to the low supply of labour within Australia, contact centres need to base their workforce management strategies around lowering turnover rates. Improving workforce engagement and employee workplace culture are some of the biggest factors affecting turnover rate.
While there are many ways contact centre managers can improve engagement, very few methods channel improvements towards contact centre goals. By incorporating gaming elements into the training process, a task that would once be described as monotonous can now be more interesting. Gamification software is one of the most widely adopted technologies across the industry, allowing agents to enjoy gaming elements throughout their training process and feel engaged at work. This software has played a prominent role in many successful businesses and continues to grow with the expanding demand.
While the market may be challenging for contact centres to navigate, the latest technology solutions provide growth to companies looking to accelerate their performance and an opportunity to sustainably increase agent efficiency and performance. Companies who have ambitious growth targets must look past the up-front costs of new technology adoption and understand the value it can bring to a contact centres’ longevity.
Call Design sources best-in-breed solutions to help contact centres elevate performance through technology adoption. Should you or your contact centre want to know more about how any of our solutions can improve your contact centre, speak to our friendly team today.
Building A Modern Engagement-Centric Workforce
Changing customer preferences and volatile market behaviour have forced customer service teams to deploy greater agility to remain relevant in meeting customer enquiries. The need to rethink how contact centres operate has become topical over the last few years, in part due to contact centres moving slowly into digital transformation.
While agent tasks can be monotonous, building strong engagement underpins continual improvement of the customer service experience. Like most workplaces, high performance comes as a by-product of high engagement channelled by productive management.
Managers who micro-manage based on instantaneous KPIs demonstrate a lack of willingness to evaluate performance on a broader scale and frequently overlook engagement's importance and long-lasting benefits. A highly motivated and engaged workforce delivers a more personalised customer experience and elevates handling time and workplace efficiencies.
Start with Engagement
When companies look to make significant operational improvements, it’s crucial to master the basics and ensure a strong foundation for growth. Engagement is the most important factor for managers looking to advance contact centre KPIs. If your contact centre also wants to increase its customer service satisfaction score, managers can coach agents to amplify customer service quality, and provide constructive feedback to improve performance. When managers focus on building engagement and set new KPIs, agents can actively seek new methods to upskill and effectively absorb information to create an engaging service.
Engagement Empowers Agility
Over the past 18 months, contact centres have had to employ greater agility and flexibility than ever before to continue delivering a high-quality customer service. While managers can train agents through different methods, the absorption and willingness to learn is determined by agent engagement and motivation to learn and upskill. Since contact centre agility continues to correlate with performance directly, managers should drive engagement as a means to creating agile agents.
Improving Engagement
Engagement can be developed within contact centres in a multitude of ways, although not all will align with specific performance goals. With this in mind, contact centre managers are empowered to consider an array of methods to build engagement.
One method of boosting engagement is organising activities outside of the work environment, such as a staff party, going to an Escape room, or having a team dinner at a local restaurant. These forms of engagement building events are compelling and demonstrate a commitment to employees.
Another method of building engagement that is pivoting is gamification. By incorporating gaming elements into the training and assessment process, agents receive a break from regular workload and can be stimulated with a game-aligned with building skills relevant to contact centre’s goals.
The Power of Gamification
The adoption of gamification in contact centre’s is running full throttle – because it works! A recent Gartner report shows that more than 70% of businesses within the Global 2000 list have adopted gamification to improve employee engagement. This is a true testimony to the value obtained by implementing gamification.
With gamification, agents can be stimulated through audio and visual cues and interact with a game aligned with contact centre growth. Contact centres worldwide are seeing advances in training effectiveness, and gamification is the answer. Did you know that 72% of the workforce believes gamification inspires them to work harder? Gamification boosts engagement and creates a scalable and customisable method to engage, motivate, and coach employees, thereby making it one of the most valuable investments a contact centre can make.
Within the current market climate, it’s critical to boost engagement to drive other areas of improvement within contact centres. While there are many ways in which contact centres can elevate engagement, gamification continues to be the most effective in terms of cost and alignment to goals and KPIs. Call Design offers some of the most comprehensive gamification solutions in the contact centre industry, allowing contact centres in any industry to grow business and amplify customer service. For enquiries about gamification and how your contact centre can use utilise the capabilities, speak to our professional team at Call Design.
#1: Back-Office WFO Series: Three Tips to Designing a Forecast Task List
Providing the business with a robust forecast is the number one challenge when implementing WFM into the back-office space.
“WFM is the art and science of scheduling the right number of people with the right skills, at the right time, to handle work within service level, and within budget” the key factor to getting this right is to make staffing related decisions based off the forecasted workload demand.
The number one failing when implementing WFM into the back office is workload forecasting. All too often, forecasting lands in the ‘too hard basket’ and people end up making ‘off the cuff’ staffing decisions that impact the customer and the business. There is, however, a light at the end of the tunnel. It takes a little more effort and time to get your forecasting right, but the payoff is irrefutable.
Here are a few tips to help you establish your forecasting program.
1. Forecasting Expertise
- If utilising a contact centre forecasting expert be sure they are skilled in the varying back-office practices and processing rhythms. Back-office work is handled differently, so be sure these differences are factored in.
- Never assume to know - always ask. Leaders, 2IC’s and SMEs know the work better than anyone else so be sure to ask them questions about anomalies and complexities. This process improves confidence, believability, and acceptance from leaders.
- Workflow solutions are not always designed to ‘plug and play’ in WFM. Always validate the task list at the actual processing level. You may need to consider variables in the same tasks that impact processing time. Be sure to look at the available information in detail.
- Don’t try to design a forecast for every team to begin with. Work through one team at a time. Once you have the first forecast right, you can fast track team implementation using a similar format. Always remember to watch out for those task variables that need to be considered in each team.
- Present forecasting as a useful tool that can help leaders make better staffing decisions. Good forecasting takes a lot of the guess work out of decision making so help your team leaders use it to their advantage.
2. Forecasting Task Structure Considerations
- Don’t forget work that is conducted but is not captured in a system (or anywhere).
- Consider processing time and service level when grouping tasks.
- Incorrect blending of work can impact your ability to service within an agreed timeframe. Think of the customer.
- Available reporting information can help simplify the task lists and mix. Use what is already available.
- Take your time. As added information emerges, reverse engineer the task list to predict future impacts.
Revise, review, and revalidate as needed. Valid mapping of all tasks is crucial.
3. Team Engagement
- Involving the right staff is a critical step to getting the task list right and building a strong forecast. There’s no point creating a forecast if the leaders have no confidence in the numbers. Inclusion is guaranteed to help define and refine, a robust forecasting list.
Building a task list that is utilised to create a usable workload forecast takes time. Forecasting is one of the most valuable tools in WFM that provides leaders with the confidence to make appropriate staffing decisions and allows for more robust financial and future planning.
Author: Laura Horton, Senior Consultant at Call Design.
5 Things To Consider When Designing Your Gamification
Boosting employee motivation, training effectiveness, and quality of output can all be done by an ingenious method called gamification. Gamification refers to incorporating gaming elements into the training process or other elements of a workplace to diversify and improve the agent development.
Gamification doesn't just improve the working and training processes of agents; it also allows managers to better track and adjust training to accommodate for employees based on their performance.
While a large proportion of recent studies have shown that gamification can improve KPIs in virtually every touchpoint of a contact centre, there are still dozens of areas of consideration that need to be evaluated to provide an effective gamification system. Read on to discover what they are.
1. Look Long-Term
With any system, not just gamification, it's crucial to outline and understand the long-term benefits. Understand what problem you want to solve with its implementation. Employing systems based on short-term problem resolution can have large long-term implications. The saying, "everything in moderation", definitely rings true in this circumstance. Start small and test the waters. Pick one thing and build from there, developing more sophisticated ways of using the solution as you learn from your agents about what works best. You will get more from a system that is continuously updated as it will keep your agents engaged.
2. Understand the Value in Rewards
Rewards are among the biggest motivators throughout gamification; it incentivises good performance and constantly encourages agents to better themselves throughout the training process. There are two big things to bear in mind when designing your gamification systems, one is not to overemphasise rewards, and two, to moderate the number of rewards.
If a gamification system overemphasises rewards, this alludes to the idea that an agent can only perform successfully by hitting their numbers, when in reality, there are many other aspects to good agent performance. An over-emphasis on rewards can see agents focus too much on their KPIs and begin to feel like robots. As a result, customer service quality can drop, and agents can lose engagement and not take it seriously.
Levelling up is a way to keep agents motivated to move through content organised in a specific progression. It requires completion or mastery of one level before getting access to the next. Levels typically increase in difficultly as the game progresses and require skills acquired in all previous levels. Levelling up plays to the user’s drive to conquer harder tasks and their desire for higher recognition and reward.
3. Encourage Problem-Solving
As previously mentioned, not everything goes to plan. Especially when many things go wrong at once, or there is an overabundance of uncertainty at any given time, agents may be required to act like a supervisor or a manager. Therefore, developing good problem-solving skills, which improve an agent's ability to think laterally, is important for contingency planning and setting agents up for future promotion or career progression.
Through its immersive training platform, gamification solutions can help develop enhanced problem-solving abilities and integrate lateral problem solving to see agents handle uncertain or difficult situations without needing the assistance of a manager.
4. Track and Report
Tracking and reporting plays an important role in gamification success. On the front end, it can reveal areas where agents can improve the quality of their interactions with customers. On the backend the reporting can track and measure the agents’ performance to determine progress and goal attainment which will help you identify tweaks that need to be made and when new goals need to be gamified.
5. Playtest and Market Internally
Playtesting throughout the gamification design process provides insight as to whether goals are being achieved. When the game is ready, playtest with a small group to identify any bugs and to ensure the game is driving the correct behaviours. Also encourage these people to spread the word about the game and to build excitement within the centre so that when it is launched, staff are engaged and excited about it.
If you would like to find out more about our gamification solution, speak to our professional consultants today.
Getting Data from your WFM System
Which is better Direct Query or Webservice?
This is a question that is asked a lot in businesses where data needs to be extracted from various sources and collated. As technology and security increase, so too does the tightening around access and use of said data, especially within the contact centre. Traditionally, this access was analogous, and extracts could be run either by direct user access or via an application middleware, but these processes are changing.
As more and more components of contact centre solutions move to web applications, access to the data for other reporting and external teams has been moved into webservices and away from direct database access. But what is the difference in how you get your data and which method is right for your circumstance?
Security
Most systems now have a web application and APIs that will allow some, if not all, required data to be collected and aggregated via a webservice.
WFM systems are no different but accessing this data can vary from team to team. Direct database access usually requires users or services to have direct, set access to the database. This can be deemed a security risk as these credentials can create multiple entry points to the data in the backend.
A webservice can minimise this risk by allowing an additional business layer that can handle multiple users and accounts and limit access to only what the webservice requires. Whilst this may not be for every scenario, most webservices calls are suitable for the reporting requirements for WFM, easing the security concerns that requesting a service account with direct access can put on the database.
Maintenance
WFM systems have been revamping to cater for shifting industry standards in how contact centres are servicing their agents and this overhaul has seen many backend changes happen over a short period of time. This requires a lot of additional work for integrated platforms and systems that connect directly to the database, which can at times result in multiple software upgrades or middleware connectors being required or changed as a result. Whilst nothing is forever, a webservice call may be a better option, giving you some flexibility in being able to change the call’s connection rather than the entire integrated system.
Direct connections may result in quicker processing which in turn are more beneficial for some basic report outputs, but integrations pertaining to some more glacial systems, such as payroll or ACD integrations, that are not likely changing, could have some more serious ramifications, with entire connectors or middleware requiring an overhaul. Being able to dynamically redirect any backend changes to these systems via the webservices, could save both time and money as you route the relevant data to the unchanged systems, for them, as if nothing had changed.
Scalability
Many clients directed to one database can cause bottlenecking, slow speed, and impact overall query performance, especially in multi tenanted and large WFM environments. Traditionally, there are methods for scaling out and making the data accessible via direct connectivity - replication, shared databases repositories, etc., which all require some additional overhead and server costs. As environments start to streamline and move to SAAS models, these costs become more obvious as the other WFM infrastructures become more efficient.
As your contact centre grows, so too do the connections of integrated components and the continuous exporting of data required in near real time, making it more difficult to setup synchronised environments for external systems to access. Webservices have their own consequences, with persistent connections more common to direct access querying and slower processing times as webservices get more complex. The business layer however allows for load balancing options to help with distribution and the ability to have different versions and languages of the same service. This provides added flexibility for your environment and integrated systems based on your provider’s preferences.
In conclusion, webservices offer better security, less maintenance and better scalability when getting data from your WFM system.
Written by Leon Breakenridge – Technical Services Specialist
Why Gamification Is Critical To Customer Service
The customer service we experience today and our expectations of it are vastly different from what it was two years ago. As many brands no longer have physical stores and in-person sales representatives, building strong customer service through their contact centres has become essential.
As an extenuating number of brands have made the transition and upscaled their contact centre resources, providing differentiation between brands at this level has become increasingly difficult. The demands that customers hold on reputable brands and their customer service team has increased tenfold. As e-commerce looks to remain a dominant force for the foreseeable future, building a contact centre that can handle both the demands in quality and increased quantity remains the crucial challenge for contact centre managers.
Pressure on Customer Service
The importance of a good customer service experience is undisputed, especially during the pandemic, as the contact centre may have been one of the only interactions a customer had with a business. As a result, the way a customer views your organisation could rest entirely upon their interaction with your customer support team.
The pressures upon contact centres to produce high quality, fast, and engaging experiences is increasing by the day. A customer can easily identify the difference between an engaged agent and one that is not so it is important to make sure your staff have the training and skills they need to keep them motivated.
Building Engagement
Staff engagement in the contact centre is hugely important. Handling time, customer service scores, and energy displayed throughout the query represent important elements that can help brands succeed and build meaningful relationships with their customers.
Improving agent engagement in your contact centre can lead to a raft of benefits:
• A reduction in sick leave
• Greater agent satisfaction
• Higher agent retention
• Lower gross agent training costs
• Higher customer satisfaction scores
• Higher self-motivation
Building engagement and improving productivity simultaneously is however no easy feat.
Channel Engagement
Gamification represents one of the fastest growing methods of building engagement with 60% of agents reporting that they felt more engaged after gamification had been introduced into their training and work. Gamification allows contact centre managers to build engagement by appealing to a larger array of emotions, using more senses, and adding rewards and point scoring elements into the training process.
While building engagement within any workplace is relatively easy with increased breaks, rotating tasks, and other small activities, most of them lead to decreased productivity and lost focus on the task at hand. It is for this very reason that gamification has become so popular all over the world. These small gaming elements that might seem mindless and off-task are specially designed to improve agents' performance and sculpt the perfect customer service experience while they play the game.
Gamification solutions are extremely customisable and integrate with existing training procedures and KPI measuring systems. No matter the industry that a contact centre services, gamification can keep agents on task, continually learning and most importantly engaged.
As the demand in quality and quantity of customer service continues to increase, solutions such as gamification play an important role in developing contact centres for the future. Gamification impacts the quality-of-service delivery in two direct ways:
1. It Models the 'Perfect' Customer Experience
Throughout the training process, agents are taught what the perfect customer experience looks like by watching others or learning from customer service handbooks. Neither of which allows for an immersive experience and a complete comprehension of providing a positive customer experience.
Gamification allows agents to engage more of their senses throughout the training process and practice delivering a positive service before being presented with actual clients.
2. Gamification Builds Engagement
A more engaged agent conveys more energetic emotions throughout the experience. They are more aware of the customer needs, and are more motivated to handle customer queries faster and with higher quality.
Through a variation of activities, gamification instantaneously builds engagement and improves the customer service experience.
As the increased demands for quality and quantity of customer service show no signs of slowing down, contact centre managers must build engagement designed to last and continue growing with the customer's demands. Gamification represents one of the most cost effective and effective methods of building engagement in the contact centre. Companies worldwide are turning to gamification as the next best means of improving their output and efficiencies and 40% of the Global 1000 organisations are already using gamification.
If your contact centre is looking to improve its operations and deliver a higher quality of customer service, speak to our professional consultants to discover the potential of Call Design's gamification solutions.
How People Are Equally As Important As Systems
With digital transformation in full flight, the central focus amongst virtually every manager is employing solutions that drive efficiency. While this focus has worked for some time, the relationship between employees and technology is more complicated than it would seem.
Development in technology has empowered growth in every corner of our society, and in ways we would have never been able to imagine. Software and hardware have enabled operations to dramatically improve, ensuring employees complete simple and administratively cumbersome tasks faster than ever. While investing in technology and software development has enabled contact centres to grow faster than ever, investing in people is equally as important to keep staff engaged and productive.
Changing Consumer Landscape
Strong growth in the e-commerce sector and lockdowns worldwide have been the primary driver for increased contact centre customer service demand. During the pandemic, e-commerce has grown by 77% year on year, and the trend looks to remain constant for years to come. While technology has helped large scale organisations boost revenue streams, the increased demand for products and services correlates with a surge in demand for better customer service.
As the demand for contact centre customer service has skyrocketed so too has the subsequent need for online assistance; something companies may have otherwise performed in-person pre-pandemic. As a result, wait times for customer service, dispatch times, and processing times of queries continues to climb. Due to this, many contact centre managers are looking at the best ways to keep staff engaged and optimised in both front and back office.
No Customer Support ROI
You can't put a price on customer service. While many studies have attempted to estimate the price of customer service and its direct impact on sales revenue, they always fall short of a conclusive result. There are hundreds of variables that change the impact of customer service on a business's branding and revenue performance. As a result, when companies look to cut costs and consolidate their expenses, customer service is often one of the first areas they turn to.
Successful companies have realised the value of strong customer service and invest heavily in it to ensure that staff have the skills and technology they need to do the best job possible.
Where Costs Amount
It's easy to cut costs and simply downscale your customer service model, but business leaders need to be aware that there comes a point when underfunding and trying to cut costs out of customer service can work against their business goals.
By underfunding a contact centre, agent turnover is likely to be higher, training costs increase, customer satisfaction scores fall, and many other KPIs may not be met. Recruitment and training costs can cost up to three times more than an annual salary. The evidence supports that high agent retention is crucial to contact centre profitability and business growth.
Use Technology In The Right Way
Many contact centres turn to technology to improve their performance and implement an IVR to route the calls to the correctly skilled agent. A complicated and hard to use menu however can significantly impact customer service scores. Situations like these commonly add even more work for the agent, slow down the processes, and damage customer relationships.
A better way to manage your agents when workload ramps up is to remember that they are human at the end of the day, and they can't always run at 100%. Technology should be implemented that will assist them to do their job rather than make it more complicated.
Well implemented IVR systems, intelligent automation to help with real time changes to schedules, and good workforce management solutions can all increase efficiency without increasing the load on an agent.
Intelligent automation is like having a virtual manager for every agent. The 'virtual manager' can monitor handling time, breaks and off phone time as well as queue performance to make quick management decisions and help staff perform better. A good workforce management tool lets staff view their schedules remotely, apply for leave and swap shifts as well as view their day to day performance to ensure they meet their KPIs.
The Relationship Between Technology and Human
Creating a successful contact centre involves using your technology to leverage the humanity of your organisation. Technology will always be trying to get more and more out of your staff however the more you consider the lives of your employees, the more successful your customer service operation will be.
While it's easy to say that you should build solutions around your labour's needs and existing capabilities, creating such systems and processes is far from easy. An in-depth understanding on how customer service agents work is crucial to building a contact centre designed to last. Call Design and their team of experienced professionals provide consulting and training on how to optimise your contact centre. If you are looking to improve the service you provide to your customers, get in contact with one of our professionals today.
How To Use Gamification To Improve CX In Your Contact Centre
High-quality professional customer support is crucial to building lasting customer relationships. Contact centres represent the voice of many organisations, existing as the first point of contact for customers engaging with your organisation. Ensuring agents are trained to the highest standard and represent the company’s personality, values, and characteristics in all communication remains paramount to a successful customer service model and company success but also by investing in upskilling your staff, they feel motivated and engaged.
Understanding that every agent is different, catering for their unique characteristics, behaviours, and preferred learning styles is vital to the training courses they do. Textbook knowledge, learning from presentations or listening to co-workers presents limitations when training agents. Gamification changes the game in the agent training space. Allowing contact centre managers to accommodate a more extensive range of learning styles provides a better guarantee of keeping staff engaged and learning.
While gamification is designed primarily to improve the engagement of agents, its effects upon customer service quality have already been illustrated. A recent study has shown that companies enjoy a 700% conversion rate when using gamification within their workplace. Better engaged agents are retained for longer, thereby building a better knowledge base within your contact centre. A highly knowledgeable workforce directly impacts the quality of customer service and the overall experience. An engaged workforce is more expressive and engaging throughout the customer service experience, creating a stronger connection with the customer and improving client relations.
Here are effective ways to use gamification within your contact centre to improve the quality of customer service.
Data Analytics
The contact centre industry is no different from any other and analysing big data allows managers to refine output more accurately than ever before. Within the contact centre, a couple of seconds can mean the difference between a good and bad customer service score. Thereby, training an agent to perfection is crucial to the performance of any contact centre.
Gamification allows you to manage metrics during the training process, enabling managers to understand the strengths and weaknesses of agents in a quantifiable manner. Metrics include:
• First call resolution
• Average speed to answer
• Average handle time
• Average after work time
• Customer satisfaction rate
• Schedule adherence
Understanding and analysing this data in the training process allows managers to refine the output and the processes. Analysing and using this data during the training process has enabled almost immediate improvement to bottom-line performance across several contact centres.
Constantly Change the Experience
If you keep giving the same type of training in the same way to agents, they will get bored. Mix it up. Create different groups- There are many ways to define groups once your agents are ready to tackle more sophisticated and multi-task / multi-player games. Obvious groups would be those by team, department etc. Other ways to make it more interesting is to create different groups such as those with a birthday that month, hair colour or names that begin with a certain letter. By doing this you can foster collaboration with groups of people who don’t normally work together.
Team Building
Nothing builds teams like some friendly competition. Working together to achieve a common goal through some friendly rivalry is a proven way to build teamwork. Gamification uses games and other activities to build teamwork within your contact centre. While these games may seem like a waste of time, designing team-based activities aligned with key training goals can see agents have fun and develop teamwork while simultaneously honing their contact centre skills.
A strong and successful team is essential to improving the quality of customer service. A well-developed team can support each other through high influxes of inbound customer queries and challenging times, thereby ensuring that the agents within your contact centre work together to improve the quality of customer service.
Replace Smaller Assessments With Gamification
Replacing small assessments within your contact centre can prove highly beneficial to your bottom line through a range of contributing factors. Due to its more immersive and engaging experience, Gamification better encapsulates your agents’ performance than stand-alone written tests. Using gamification as check-up assessments removes a great deal of the stress heading into testing, as the experience is seen as more casual and engaging. Incorporating gamification has already seen dramatic improvements to engagement, with a recent study showing that over 80% of people feel more engaged and happier at work.
Developing small gamification elements throughout an agent’s time has lasting effects on contact centre engagement. Small memory recognition games are an easy way to build variety into an agent’s employment, improving engagement and attentiveness.
Gamification has been gaining traction since 2010, with its positive effects on the industry becoming more apparent. Building engagement has become the central focus for the contact centre industry, as the quality of customer service is more valued than handling time.
Enveloping gamification is easy and yields positive results immediately amongst your workforce. For more information on gamification download our ebook https://calldesign.com.au/solutions/gamification or speak to our professional team at Call Design and discover more about how we can help you increase engagement and motivation in your contact centre.