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.