6 Simple Steps to Evaluate your Gamification Cycle

By now, most contact centers are aware that gamification can be a helpful tool to motivate and engage their agents. But it’s not enough to implement a gamification strategy once and call it a day. Contact center managers must constantly evolve their gamification strategies to continually increase agent engagement. Setting new goals and challenges for agents and assisting them along the way keeps games fresh and appealing to continually motivate agents. Not sure where to start? No problem. We created a simple gamification cycle to evaluate the gamification strategies you currently have in place and show you how to implement new ones. This way, your contact center constantly evolves to create the highest level of agent engagement and performance. 

1. What Do I Measure? 

Beginning with specific goals in mind is the key to an effective gamification strategy. What goals do you want to accomplish? What specific behaviors do you want agents to focus on? Supervisors and managers can set goals within agents’ individual dashboards or on a team level. Each agent can work towards something exciting, all while sharpening the tools in their customer service toolbox. Setting goals to measure the contact center’s efficiency help supervisors and agents alike to enjoy a more streamlined approach to their work.  

2. Who Wins? 

Traditional gamification efforts mostly award top performers. This can be a shortcoming with your gamification strategy, especially considering the high attrition rate in contact centers. Only rewarding top agents creates a cycle where other agents never seem to win and become defeated. With Five9 Gamification, different teams and agents can have goals that suit their strengths and weaknesses, so they feel challenged, but not defeated. With an automated scoring system, visibility into results, and an online marketplace to put badges and coins into action, gamification has never been simpler or fairer. 

3. Create the Scoreboard 

A little bit of healthy competition never hurts. Healthy competition in the contact center is one of the best ways to keep agents engaged. Creating competitions within teams and across the entire contact center helps agents feel motivated to race their colleagues. Custom dashboards and wallboards to display current competition progress and results of past races let agents see who is winning and what they have taken home. This creates encouragement to hit their goals to win prizes, coins, and badges. 

4. Coach and Develop 

Refining the skills of contact center agents is a key aspect to running a successful contact center. Some agents may be great at hitting their average handle time (AHT) goal, but their first call resolution (FCR) is low. Providing transparency into personal performance shows the agent they need to shift from getting the customer on and off the phone as quickly as possible to taking the time to resolve an issue, even if it lowers their AHT. While it may seem exhausting to evaluate each  agent individually, Five9 Performance Dashboard offers quick and insightful visibility into each team and agent, which allows supervisors to quickly fix any issues before they get out of hand.  

5. Reward 

Most employees find rewards to be motivating. Rewards you offer your agents can vary from gift cards to paid time off. With so many possible rewards you can give, it’s important to understand what rewards your agents care about. Being intentional about the rewards you offer can go a long way in creating the most efficient and effective contact center. Setting prices that match the desire for a prize, for example, allows agents to save up their coins to redeem larger prizes or purchase smaller items to continually keep their head in the game. Rewards that are off target or unwanted can cause agents to become disinterested in gamification. Supervisors and executives must touch base frequently to assure that prizes are motivating for their specific teams. 

6. Repeat 

The final step in the Gamification Cycle is to repeat – and never stop repeating. Re-evaluating each step will further fine-tune contact center operations. The optimal gamification strategy is ever changing. With Five9 Performance Dashboard, tweaking objectives and goals is simple and inspires agents to constantly grow in their roles.