GAMIFICATION

Is gamification the right choice for your contact centre? Are your employees excited to come to work each and every morning? Or are they disengaged, disinterested and lack motivation and drive?

According to a recent survey, 70% of employees are disengaged in the workplace. Some of the reasons driving disengagement include pay, industry, management and company culture. It is in every organisation’s interest to have motivated employees. Whether it is in sales, customer service or collections, ensuring that your employees are motivated and engaged should be a key focus.

Employee Motivation

Employees need both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in the workplace. Reward, recognition and competition are all excellent motivators. Gamification works well within a contact centre environment as it leverages a number of game mechanics workplaces to keep employees engaged and focused. Gamification is the marriage of productivity and technology where game mechanics are used in a non-gaming environment.

Engagement is a huge issue for many organisations now and the impact of this is costing £millions. If organisations do not do anything about disengagement in the workplace, then their businesses will suffer.

 The psychology behind gamification

“Gamification is 75% psychology and 25% technology.”  (Quote by Gabe Zichermann in his book Gamification by Design). What gamification does is it taps on the psychological cues that push our day-to-day decisions. A gamification tool is a platform for competition, achievements, and progress management. Gamification is fun–but it has one objective. As a manager or C-level executive, you are willing to try gamification to get the results you want: encourage productivity and the engagement of your employees.

The key to all of this is that it drives employee behaviour in to achieve the overall organisational objective. Behaviour is not an easy thing to change. To change behaviour, there are three elements that must converge (according to Professor B.J. Fogg – experimental psychologist at Stanford University); he says that motivation, ability and trigger are the three things that have to happen at the same time for behaviour to change. Can gamification affect your employees’ behaviour?

Why does gamification work?

Gamification only works when it motivates your employees to do something. While it can be successful in curbing bad habits and promoting better behaviour, it is important to have a sound understanding of where the motivation comes from. For the first time, we are seeing four Generational Demographics in the workplace. It is key that you understand what drives and motivates all of these demographics – particularly when it comes to reward. It is also essential that employee goals/KPI’s are aligned with the corporate objective in order to drive the right behaviour.

There are three basic elements that sustain motivation which require focus and understanding to help you understand how and why gamification is motivational:

1.    Autonomy: When your employees pursue an activity for its own sake and not because external forces compel them, they gain motivation. They feel in charge. If your employees are given the opportunity to select a course of action based on their own opinions, they will tend to stick to their goals for a longer period of time.

 2.    Value: Your employees are more motivated when something of value to them is at stake. If they think it is important, they will work harder on it. Staying true to their beliefs enables them to be more invested in their job.

 3.    Competence: As your employees invest more time into an activity, they will become more competent in it. Believing that effort fosters competence and can inspire your employees to work harder on their goals.

 How does gamification work?

Gamification increases employee engagement because it changes the way employees interact with their work and with their colleagues. It increases their commitment, motivates them through competition and inspires collaboration.

Commitment

We are seeing an increase in multi-skilled advisors to handle ever increasing complex calls due to AI. Typically, this requires training sessions that takes employees away from their work and costs the organisation valuable staff hours. One of the alternatives to this process is to gamify learning.

Your goal is simple – have a skilled agent. Instead of scheduling training sessions, create an award for those that meet the requirements of a skilled agent. Have your employees work on becoming a “Guru” or a “Product Master” badge owner in their own free time. Gamifying learning drives mastery.

Competition

Many organisations have whiteboard or email contests that they run on a monthly basis. Gamification provides an alternative to this, but rather than running a single contest, you can engage your employees in multiple “quests” or contests simultaneously.

These quests can range from “The best customer feedback”, “The fastest response time” to anything related to your line of work. Have your employees compete for “Top scores” or the best rank. Mix all these contests together and have a “public leaderboard” for personal, team, and company score.

Employees can track their personal best scores versus company best scores with ease through their UI. It is extremely motivating when recognition comes from achievements that are aligned with company goals.

Collaboration

Gamification can be a powerful tool in driving collaboration between your employees. The employee who was a top performer last week can be encouraged to publish their best practices for others to view. In doing so, they can even be rewarded with a special badge if they produce top-rated content. This allows employees to seek out one another. If a new hire is working toward a new badge and is confused by a single objective, gamification allows him/her to reach out to those who have already earned it and ask for their advice.

By successfully implementing gamification, you will be giving its “players”:

·      Motivation and drive to win, get rewarded, or gain accolades

·      The ability to break down tasks and empower them to pick up new ones

·      Trigger or cue to complete tasks

When all these are met, gamification can change employee behaviour. Motivated and engaged employees are the natural result.

 Here are some numbers that support the point:

According to Gartner, 40% of the Global 1000 will use gamification as the primary mechanism in transforming business operations. Gamification is seen as a top and legitimate form of enlivening employees. With top corporations and organisations hopping on the gamification wave, it is only logical to project that more smaller-sized and smaller-scale companies will follow suit.

Engagement is one of the largest and most pressing management issues across industries. Gartner said that 70% of business transformation efforts fail due to disengaged workers!