Strong and relentless competition at work causes a lot of stress and leads to many negative, unhealthy consequences. On the other hand, the lack of motivation and commitment makes the employee dissatisfied, ineffective and thus reduces the company’s results. Employees of the call center industry are particularly exposed to a decline in work efficiency, and employers wonder where to look for a solution.
Every day they face the question of how to introduce healthy competition that would motivate consultants to act, resulting in obtaining the expected results? How do you keep the competition at a reasonable level? The solution may be building motivation through gamification.
What is Gamification
Gamification, is a method that allows you to change people’s behavior to obtain a higher degree of their involvement with the help of mechanics known from various types of games. Anyone who has played a computer or board game at least once, be it alone, with friends or with a virtual opponent, associates it with a form of entertainment and pleasure. Why not use these positive effects of games to motivate consultants in your company? By eliminating obstacles, overcoming subsequent levels, achieving better and better results, as well as the prospect of victory, the employees of companies using the gamification method are more involved, also in tasks or projects that previously seemed uninteresting or even boring to them.
Gamification in the Call Center Industry
The consultant’s everyday life is a constant challenge, working with people who are not always friendly, and the awareness of constant monitoring of their results. All this can lead to stressful situations, decreased commitment and motivation to work. Therefore, it is important to ensure that gamification does not become another element that causes anxiety. When implementing gamification in your Call Center company, you need to remember that its goal is not to select the weakest employees or punish them, but to create a space in which each consultant participating in the game will be happy to perform their tasks, will be able to check what they have done well and what they have done. wrong, eliminate mistakes and win more goals to win.
Where to Start
The basic form of gamification in call centers are all kinds of short-term contests, introduced occasionally during individual campaigns in order to strengthen the result criterion. Some companies have implemented entire platforms that allow employees to be motivated through games. Mostly they are based on healthy competition between employees, be it in terms of number of sales or quality. It is important to keep publicly available rankings that act on ambition and encourage the increase of the effectiveness of consultants fighting to improve the result. Diversifying the difficulty of each level of the game will make the routine activities more interesting, because they will only be a stage that must be overcome in order to start the next one. In order to strengthen ties between employees, it is worth focusing on group competitions,
A Handful of Ideas
A popular idea used in a call center is the form commonly known as the “league of champions”, ie the drawing of a new pair of consultants every day, which competes with each other all day in terms of the number of sales. There are also contests based on the principles of operation of board games, suitably adapted to the assumptions of the project, or card games based, for example, on collecting cards with sales arguments, which consultants must use when conducting a simulated conversation with the client. Telmon has even created a proprietary platform “Gamification”, which allows consultants to check their results and descriptions of subsequent tasks. Thanks to the platform, project managers can supervise it, using a separate panel that contains all the game mechanics and additional statistics to support their work.
Tangible Effects
Perhaps the greatest advantage of gamification is breaking the monotony. Goals and assumptions change, but the nature of daily work remains almost the same. Giving the tasks a new setting in the form of an appropriate game provides much more entertainment, interrupts the routine, sets short and long-term goals in the form of fun, which of course translates into motivation and, above all, binds employees more closely with the tasks performed.
There are many forms of gamification based on popular motivational games that can be adapted to the nature of individual projects or campaigns in almost all industries. It is necessary to properly frame and add a story layer, as well as differentiate tasks and score. The reward system must not be forgotten either. Of course, the method requires a lot of work and constant monitoring of the game, its modification and improvement, however – as the examples show – the results are worth the effort.