Contact Center Gamification:

Let the Games Begin

September 2014

Sponsored By:

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Table of Contents

What is Gamification? ............................................................................................. 1

Not Just Fun and Games ........................................................................................ 1

The Game is On in the Contact Center ................................................................... 2

Customers Get in the Game ................................................................................... 2

The Three ‘R’s of Gamification: Recognition, Rewards and Results ....................... 2

Gamification Do’s and Don’ts .................................................................................. 3

Deciding If Gamification is Right for Your Contact Center ...................................... 4

Guidelines for Successfully Rolling Out a Gamification Program ............................ 5

Level Up: What’s Next ............................................................................................ 7

About Intradiem ....................................................................................................... 8

About DMG Consulting LLC .................................................................................... 8

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Gamification is an emerging application that has captured the attention of managers, employees and customers. Based on the art and behavioral science of gaming, gamification applications are starting to catch on and are being incorporated into internal production environments and customer-facing websites to engage and retain employees and customers. Apparently, people of all demographics enjoy playing games, particularly when it makes routine tasks or work more interesting. The concept and practice of using challenges, such as achieving reward levels, as a technique for engaging people has been around for years. Airlines, retailers and credit card companies, for example, have successfully used reward programs to build customer loyalty. What’s new is the developing market of packaged gamification solutions that provide companies with a framework, development environment and tools, and possibly a portal to use to create their own customized programs.

What is Gamification?

DMG defines gamification as “the application of gaming and behavioral modification science, methodology and techniques in business applications and processes to accelerate adoption, promote engagement, and drive ideal behaviors by making experiences fun, motivating and rewarding.” Gamification applications are intended to mimic the instant gratification and reward system inherent in gaming devices, and to apply it to real-life business situations to improve performance, productivity, employee retention, performance, sales, etc. Gamification is a relatively new employee engagement concept that enables contact centers and other departments to incorporate gaming methods and techniques in business applications and processes to enhance and improve agent/staff performance, motivate and drive ideal behaviors, and provide recognition and awards for goal achievement. Gamification functionality is also being incorporated into enterprise and community websites to encourage certain behaviors.

Not Just Fun and Games

Early adopters of gamification solutions are seeing impressive success rates. This should come as no surprise; gamification methodology is rooted in the principles of behavioral science: motivation, reinforcement, reward and behavior modification. Gamification is about engaging employees (and customers) and using game mechanics, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, and recognition to drive desired behaviors from both constituent groups. It gives employees visibility into the information and tools they need to make self-directed improvements and sustainable changes to their performance. Gamification serves a similar purpose for customers – giving them access to challenges that keep them coming back.

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The Game is On in the Contact Center

Gamification is ideal for staff-intensive environments and operating areas like contact centers and back offices, where it can be used as an agent empowerment tool. Gamification solutions provide agents with real-time performance data that is directly tied to the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to them. These solutions are being used to motivate agents to improve their performance and rank by giving them challenges, tasks, activities, quests, etc., that are designed to “level-up” their performance. Many of these solutions come with internal social media communities to foster collaboration, encourage peer support, and provide a fun and welcome diversion without disrupting the goal of the department – delivering an outstanding customer experience.

Customers Get in the Game

Game mechanics are also being leveraged to promote customer engagement. Gamification is being applied to help drive active participation in online community sites, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance brand loyalty. Companies are “gamifying” a growing number of customer activities to make them more “fun” and to get more people to utilize self-service resources, instead of requiring assistance from costly agents and employees. Gamification is being used, for example, for customer on-boarding, product registration, assembly instructions, product tutorials, frequently asked questions, etc. Companies are rewarding their customers for handling these activities on their own. In doing so, enterprises appear to be getting customers to return to their websites and self-service environments to see what else they can do to earn points and achieve levels. It could be the novelty of these new gamification initiatives, but based on preliminary results, these solutions appear to be having the desired impact.

The Three ‘R’s of Gamification: Recognition, Rewards and Results

Gamification provides a framework for organizations to motivate employees and customers to behave in ways that are beneficial to the enterprise. For agents, recognition and rewards are tied to achieving results on performance goals, something they are accountable for anyway. For customers, gamification promotes engagement with the product, user community, and increasing brand identification. Gamification injects fun, competition, and possibly intrigue into the process, in the form of surprises and perks via intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Employees and customers perceive that there’s now “something in it for me,” There’s also something in it for the enterprise – engaged and satisfied

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employees and loyal customers who are driving profitability by contributing to the bottom line.

Gamification Do’s and Don’ts

Though various forms of gamification have been used in contact centers for many years, the challenge has been that most of the programs were created and administered manually, and often resulted in claims of unfairness, as a few people consistently outperformed the rest of the department. Although the adoption of gamification applications by contact centers is relatively new, a few best practices have already emerged. As with most applications, best practices are essential for the success of the initiative. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Gamification Do’s and Don’ts Do’s Don’ts Train the staff to use the new gamification application, and explain how to earn the greatest rewards.

Expect the staff to know intuitively how the program works and how they participate and earn/redeem rewards.

Provide tangible and monetary rewards that provide real value to agents.

Treat agents like children and expect them to be happy with make-believe rewards.

Apply gamification in a manner that balances productivity, quality and customer satisfaction

Use gamification to encourage productivity at the cost of quality.

Apply gamification to as many types of activities and employees as possible; make it fair.

Use gamification for one contact center activity or group, while excluding others; it is fine to roll it out in phases.

Make gamification status available to agents on a daily basis.

Encourage agents to review their gamification status too frequently during the day.

Implement the gamification system properly. Allow system performance issues to hurt employees’ scores.

Update the games and rewards periodically to keep them interesting and challenging for agents.

Let the games and rewards stagnate.

Ask employees what types of rewards they would like, and give them choices.

Change rewards that were promised; if changes are needed, communicate them to the staff.

Treat everyone fairly and give them equal access to gamification opportunities.

Distribute work unfairly or allocate it based solely on tenure.

Allow agents to compete with each other while striving to earn rewards.

Encourage negative competition that will ultimately negatively impact agent morale.

Use gamification to encourage the delivery of outstanding customer service.

Lose sight of the department’s ultimate goal of delivering an outstanding customer experience.

Create a periodic audit process to monitor system results and agent perception of the

Build it once and forget about it.

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Figure 1: Gamification Do’s and Don’ts Do’s Don’ts program. Use the gamification program to motivate and reward a number of exemplary behaviors such as teamwork, professionalism, etc.

Tie rewards only to KPI thresholds.

Create a gamification program that is flexible and “staff-friendly.”

Offer highly limited choices, levels that are unrealistic to achieve, or reward points that expire.

Source: DMG Consulting LLC, September 2014

Deciding If Gamification is Right for Your Contact Center

Gamification is not yet well defined, but there are two primary categories of uses in business environments. The first is to make work more fun by embedding gaming techniques into the production process. The second category is to recognize and reward employees for outstanding performance. In both cases, the underlying theme is employee engagement and motivation. In the first example, where gaming techniques are built into the production process, employees are being encouraged to work more efficiently and accurately. In the second situation, gamification is used to track employee performance and deliver rewards. The two uses complement each other. Since gamification is new, its uses and applications are only beginning to emerge. Here is a decision framework that will help companies decide if gamification will add value and yield benefits for their organization and their customers.

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Figure 2: Gamification Decision Framework

Source: DMG Consulting LLC, September 2014

If you responded “no” to any of the first 5 items in the list above, it will be very difficult to succeed with gamification in your company or department. Therefore, DMG recommends that you address these issues internally with senior management, HR, contact center leaders or the head of your union prior to trying to implement a gamification strategy, process and system. If you answered “yes” to a majority of these questions, including the first 5 items, then gamification may be appropriate for your department. In this case, DMG recommends forming a gamification task force with representatives from management, supervisors, agents, QA, WFM, as well as HR. The team’s charter will be to decide if gamification is right for your department and, if so, how it should be rolled out. Once you know the best approach for your environment, it’s time to find a solution that will automate the gamification process and help you achieve your goals.

Guidelines for Successfully Rolling Out a Gamification Program

Gamification is a rewards and recognition tool that can engage and motivate staff to reach and sustain higher levels of performance. It is not going to fix broken processes or train people; it is intended to reinforce what they’ve already been trained to do, and hopefully gets them to do it more efficiently and with better

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quality. The concept behind gamification is simple; however, rolling it out properly and fairly, in a manner that does not result in employees “gaming” the system or being de-motivated by it, requires organizations to do the following:

Create a balanced scoring and rewards system – be sure to motivate the right behaviors; if you’re going to reward employees for productivity, be sure to also pay attention to quality and customer satisfaction.

Diversify the incentives – use a variety of incentives to reach many employees and ensure that certain people are not the only ones repeatedly receiving awards/recognition.

Use fair and understandable metrics – all employees must know how to earn rewards.

Level the playing field – ensure that new hires or employees with less tenure have just as much chance of achieving rewards and recognition as experienced staff.

Sell the program to the staff – instruct all employees on how to win rewards, and be clear about the behaviors that are being motivated; the more open you are about this, the better chance of achieving goals.

Train employees – even if you think the program is intuitive, it’s a good idea to roll it out with training so that everyone starts with the same level of knowledge and understands how it works.

Keep employees informed about their progress on a real-time and continuous basis – in order for the staff to stay engaged in the process, keep them informed of their progress on a daily basis, at a minimum.

Offer tangible and monetary rewards – although employees should want to work for the “betterment of their employer,” tangible rewards typically drive performance.

Update rewards continuously – people get bored and business needs change, so keep the program current and relevant.

Audit the program – review the effectiveness of the program on an ongoing basis.

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Level Up: What’s Next

The market has only just begun to explore the uses and benefits of gamification. The potential for applying gamification to real-world experiences is far-reaching and limited only by the imagination. DMG expects to see more contact center vendors incorporate gaming techniques into their solutions through internal development, partnerships and/or acquisition, making these capabilities more readily available. Gamification has not yet started to enter the back office, but the potential here is also huge. DMG expects the next two years to be highly productive for gamification providers, as organizations use these solutions to help reduce customer effort and positively engage with their customers via social community channels. Although the primary driver of gamification is employee and customer engagement, these solutions also have the potential to capture insights into what drives specific behaviors. As these solutions mature, DMG expects them to generate an increasing amount of analytics that will be used to further develop more personalized motivational tools for employees and customers.

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About Intradiem

Intradiem is the leader in intraday automation solutions for multi-channel contact centers.

Intradiem’s customers achieve an invincible customer experience with a real-time workforce by

automating manual processes such as intraday task management, intraday staffing, reskilling,

channel balancing, and real-time alerts. Intradiem empowers an immediate and consistent

response to unpredictable events and changing conditions, resulting in labor savings, improved

employee performance and a better overall customer experience.

About DMG Consulting LLC

DMG Consulting LLC is a leading independent research, advisory and consulting firm specializing

in contact centers, back-office and real-time analytics. DMG provides insight and strategic

guidance and tactical advice to end users, vendors and the financial community. Each year, DMG

devotes more than 10,000 hours to producing primary research on IT sectors, including workforce

optimization (quality management/liability recording), speech analytics, workforce management,

performance management, desktop analytics, surveying/voice of the customer, text analytics,

cloud-based contact center infrastructure, dialing, interactive voice response systems and

proactive customer care. Our actionable solutions are proven to deliver a lasting competitive

advantage, and often pay for themselves in as little as three months. Learn more at

www.dmgconsult.com.

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