Let’s Play a Game: The Growth of Gamification in Contact Centers

Gamification is the process of enhancing an existing activity, service or work by  adding game-like elements making it more attractive, active and conducive to learning. It is a perfect way to focus the attention of people in the performance of their daily tasks. Gamification makes the activity more enticing by giving someone the satisfaction of receiving incentives in return for their participation. This targets people’s emotional desires and helps take out their full potential while decreasing the stress level they get from doing their work.

Gamification Throughout the Years

The term gamification itself is a recent addition to developing ways of creating interaction between a person and technology. The term was coined in the 21^st century and was just recently added to the English lexicon. It is a term used to describe the incorporation of game in different kinds of activities that normally wouldn’t include any. In this way, gamification has influenced the eLearning process throughout the past couple of years.

Due to its effective nature of influencing motivational affordances and psychological  outcomes, it has been referred to as the next generation  method for marketing and customer engagement. This is a development that is expected to continue growing throughout the years.

Gamification and Contact Centers

Given the effective nature of gamification, it has been widely used in the workplace by managers and bosses. It brings about a unique kind of positive energy to the workplace, which is helpful because it breaks the monotony of the usual business day occurrences. It gives employees something to look forward to. Contact centers are no different. Due to the retention and engagement crisis being experienced by agents nowadays, gamification has served as a remedy by influencing the behavior of agents towards their work.

Incorporating the concept of rewards in an activity also makes the work environment more conducive to learning and growth by putting agents in a better mood. This is immensely useful to the contact center industry given that agents tend to answer calls more politely and with more enthusiasm when they are in a friendly work environment.

Benefits of Gamification

Gamification provides for numerous benefits. Most of these benefits come from the influence given by this process to the employee’s working habit, motivation and focus. Aside from this, improve knowledge retention can also be expected because the process attributes the actions of people with feelings. This reinforces the act and the knowledge learned paving way for learners to remember better.

Gamification also encourages self-determination in the performance of an activity. This is a trait that has already been successfully applied in the context of games and therefore, it affects the user by encouraging feedback. All of which help in order to make a lasting effect and impact to a person’s ability, work and determination.

Pitfalls of Gamification

Everything has its disadvantages and gamification is no exception. While it is proven to be highly effective in different industries and even eLearning for students, gamification can be ineffective to some extent. One of the downsides of using gamification is that some people can focus too much on winning that they end up neglecting the process. Motivation is one of the strengths of using this process, some people may become too invested in earning the rewards of the system that that’s the only thing they end up prioritizing. Competition is healthy but only to an extent and anything exceeding that may produce negative impact.

There is also the issue of time management. Sometimes, completionists tend to want to collect every reward out there that optimal performance is set aside. Employees should be trained on how to perform the task at hand while collecting the ‘bonus – the perk that the gamification system provides.

When you do decide that gamification is worth a try, keep it in mind that the rewards have to have value to be effective. While the main use of gamification in the working industry is providing incentives to encourage performance, this will not be effective if such incentives pose no importance to the members of the workforce.

The key takeaway is that gamification will only be effective if it is used wisely. In order to do that, intensive research of the industry and its members is needed to make sure that this process will be used in its true and utmost potential.

CH Consulting Group provides unparalleled expertise in the Contact Center and Customer Experience (CX) verticals. We have a nationwide team of industry veterans that can assist you to achieve exponential growth, manage change, and generate profit. For a comprehensive Contact Center and CX assessment and strategic plan customized for your unique business needs, connect with us here today.