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.