Find out how outbound call centers are creating stronger cultures, increasing engagement and accelerating sales performance through the magic of gamification
More than 80% of employees “feel that gamification makes them more productive, more engaged and happier at work.”
Creating stronger company cultures
One of the primary struggles of contact centers is high employee turnover–they experience between 30-45% turnover rates, on average. This leads to poor customer service, low morale, high recruiting costs and ultimately, toxic company culture. When people are constantly coming and going, there is never a chance to build solid relationships or a harmonious office culture. It’s chaotic and extremely costly–both financially and socially.
With gamification, employee engagement increases, morale is improved and agents end up staying longer. People work together and celebrate each other’s achievements. Collaboration and knowledge sharing is encouraged. Thus company culture starts to improve.
Empowering apathetic agents
Lack of motivation is another key problem in the contact center industry. Tedious, repetitive daily tasks and frustrated customers lead to burnout. Employees end up feeling annoyed and unappreciated. Gamification and digital leaderboards put the power back in the agents’ hands–data entry becomes simple and efficient, easy to interpret and readily available.
Suddenly, they have a better understanding of how they (and their colleagues) are performing. The increased awareness leads to a desire for improvement, a greater sense of purpose and happier workers.
Hitting key targets with ease
Not reaching KPIs is a problem for the contact center industry and many other industries alike. Often a shortage of transparency and little awareness on goals result in this outcome. Through data visualization and gamification, managers are able to drive behavior on desired KPIs by providing employees with clear and tangible goals and meaningful incentives to hit targets.
Example: if John is a sales director in an outbound call center that focuses on insurance sales and John knows that his sales teams close deals on 1 in 7 calls, then he immediately knows that by increasing call volume (without diminishing quality), he will increase deals closed and revenue generated.
So, John sets up a leaderboard to show the top 20 agents who are making the most calls and another that shows the top 10 agents closing the most deals (by quantity, value, or margin). As a result, his teams are more aware of their daily numbers and of their impact on bottom-line growth.
Breaking the cycle
It can be extremely difficult to break the cycle of monotony in a routine job and workplace. Performing the same tasks over and over–without any awareness of how you are doing and without incentives to perform them–leads to a high percentage of unhappy and disengaged workers.
Contact centers in particular tend to have low engagement and high turnover, so breaking the loop (lack of motivation >> staff turnover >> weakened company culture >> higher recruiting costs >> KPIs not reached >> lack of motivation…) is paramount for success.
This is where sales motivation software comes into play. Having TV screens throughout your office(s) keep everyone connected and excited. Running contests creates healthy competition and inspires people to improve their performance. Thus, work becomes fun again, company culture vastly improves and revenues soar.
(Re-published from our friends at SalesScreen.com)