How Gamification in Business Inspires Employee Engagement

In today’s dynamic market, businesses need to differentiate themselves from the competition. Fully engaging the talent and expertise of contact center employees by drawing on games and friendly competition is one powerful way to accomplish this goal. By pursuing gamification in business – especially in the contact center – companies can inspire and motivate their employees to deliver customer experiences that enable business growth, creating and sustaining a culture of success along the way. Here’s how:

Gamification in Business Motivates Contact Center Employees

Employee motivation is critical to success in a fast-paced contact center environment. Gamification in the contact center can inspire employees to continually reach new heights, engage in friendly competition with one another to discover who most regularly excels, and work to receive a coveted spot on the company leaderboard. Agents can enjoy both the satisfaction of success and the public recognition – such as special awards or incentives – that comes along with their accomplishments.

The healthy competitive spirit that gamification encourages is particularly valuable given that contact center employees often put in long hours which involve performing repetitive tasks and caring for clients who express frustration or discontent about their customer experience. Additionally, contact center agents can experience a sense of isolation, feeling cut off from their colleagues and the company culture as they forge ahead with customer calls on their own.

Without a meaningful incentive to push through these challenges, contact center representatives may eventually burn out and succumb to absenteeism. As a result, the business will suffer decreased productivity that directly impacts the bottom line. Gamification strategies can head off this common challenge by bringing employees together toward a common goal, celebrating their successes, and instilling in them a sense of shared purpose. Contact center employees that enjoy improved job satisfaction and team morale as a result of these strategies will deliver even more stellar customer service.

Gamification Inspires a Culture of Success

Company culture strongly influences employee engagement. If employees feel they are valued members of a dynamic, exciting company with a bright future, they are likely going to invest their ingenuity and talent in service of making the business a success. Gamification can play a valuable role in building a culture of success and can inspire employees to become invested in helping the company achieve its strategic goals.

Businesses can design their contact center gamification around specific KPIs, for example, to help employees fully understand how to meet their most critical objectives. Contact center agents might compete against one another on first call resolution, which is a common performance metric. They might also try to outperform one another, individually or in groups, by achieving the quickest average speed in handling a call. These quantitative metrics make the contact center’s goals very clear, increasing the likelihood that agents will meet them. The goals can be optimized as business strategies evolve, continually reaching for greater levels of sophistication and excellence.

Gamification can encourage and reinforce a culture of success beyond day-to-day customer interactions in the contact center.

Gamification Engages New Hires and Boosts Employee Retention

Gamification can encourage and reinforce a culture of success beyond day-to-day customer interactions in the contact center. Businesses can use it to accelerate employee onboarding, getting new hires excited about their new positions even before they begin working alongside their colleagues. Doing so helps reinforce the existing culture and clearly establishes expectations for new hires, encouraging them to bring a positive mindset to an increasingly cohesive contact center team.

Contact center gamification also helps new employees retain information faster and allows the contact center to quickly and flexibly bring new agents aboard. This gives the business a strategic advantage if it needs to quickly staff the contact center for a seasonal campaign, a new product launch, or another special event.

The inherent transparency of gamification in business, with its clear display of performance KPIs, also helps boost engagement and job satisfaction among employees who view a merit-based competition as inherently fair and objective. This increases employee retention, reducing the likelihood that all-star agents will depart the organization for what they might otherwise perceive as better opportunities with more inspiring workplace environments.

When it comes to boosting employee engagement and retention, the benefits of gamification are clear. By fostering a healthy atmosphere of competition in the contact center, companies can align their teams toward a common goal and have fun doing it, inspiring employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences. That, in turn, drives the kind of customer loyalty and bottom-line growth that everyone – from senior leadership to freshly minted hires – can be proud of.