Why is gamification a must in call centres?
Call centers have a turnover rate of 25-35% while the average turnover in other industries is 15%. Agent turnover is a big challenge for call centres. High turnover rates can adversely affect the overall customer experience provided. As a supervisor or admin, you know how much effort and money goes into hiring the right agents and training them. All the resources spent would mean nothing if agents don’t stay on the job and deliver what is expected of them.
But let’s look at it from the perspective of the call centre agent, it's not easy to get rejected or face angry customers every single day. The work can get monotonous and decrease motivation of employees. The nature of the job is bound to drain one emotionally. And when an agent is indifferent to the work they do, it only reflects on the customer experience provided.
Another frustrating challenge for supervisors is gaining insight into the performance of agents, as a supervisor you might want to reward high performing agents to keep them motivated and provide support or training to low performing agents.
Gamification of the call centre provides an instant solution to this. You could create a leaderboard showing metrics such as :
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Which agent has the highest call volume?
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Which agent has the least hold time?
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Which agent closed the most number of sales?
When you put up a leaderboard, the data is transparent. Friendly competition motivates agents to improve their performance. Competition can also be encouraged between teams by putting up a team leaderboard. As teams compete against each other, their performance increases thus ultimately benefiting the organization.
However, you must also be aware of the pitfalls on the metrics you choose to rank your agents on. For example if you choose to reward agents on basis of greater call volume, agents might not focus on actually solving the customer's issues, they could be in a hurry to get done with a call and move on to the next, affecting your first call resolution rates.
While gamifying your call center, it is recommended you link it to your goals. For example, if you seek to improve customer satisfaction as an organization, you could measure hold times, as lesser hold times correspond to more satisfied customers and accordingly reward agents with lesser hold time. With Freshcaller, you can obtain in depth analytics on a wide range of metrics that you would require to monitor performance. For instance when it comes to agent performance, with Freshcaller, you can get critical metrics such as average handle time, speed of answer and after call work time for each agent.