Gamification in customer service and how to do it right

If running your business were as easy as playing a game, you might find that you and your workers are more engaged, less tired, and that overall, your work doesn’t feel like work. This is what gamification is all about.

Gamification is essentially what it sounds like. When you take a series of tasks and introduce gaming elements to it, you can substantially increase the attention, and novelty involved with performing that work. When it comes to customer service, much of the work can be tedious and repetitive, which results in poorer customer service over time. If you’ve been wondering how to keep your agents more engaged with your customers when they have a problem, gamification is the key.

Research by the Pew Research Center shows that out of over 1,000 technology stakeholders, 53% predict that by the year 2020, gamification will be much more widespread among businesses.

Some benefits of game implementation for your contact center include: 

• Makes training easy: Conventional training sessions can lead to boredom and exhaustion for some agents. In this case, gamification serves as a versatile and engaging tool to expose agents to the nuances of working in a call center. By having new agents compete against each other to solve tickets, they learn the process of solving tickets quickly, and with lower materials cost than typical training.
• Improves employee engagement: Listening to customer issues on a daily basis can start to feel like a grind after a while. Drudgery can affect employee performance, which means your customer service takes a beating. To better engage your agents with their work, targets can be restructured to resemble steps to complete a quest. This way, you, your customers, and your agents can be unburdened.

Because this is a fresh area of experience design, there are a few potential pitfalls. For instance, when designed incorrectly, gamification can be detrimental to customer service. According to a report by Gartner, 80% of gamified processes will fail due to poor design. Quantifying customer service solely on the basis of parameters such as the number of tickets or number of completed reviews can undermine the goal—increasing empathy. In the rush to meet the targets, there is a chance that customer service becomes less customer-centric and more target-centric.

Likewise, if the game design includes plateaus or unsatisfying ends, your agents may feel dispirited or disillusioned. If you aren’t careful, your game can feel like a rat race. If there is no room for growth however, then your attrition rates will increase while efficiency decreases.

Lastly, when agents are pitted against each other, it can generate a sense of unhealthy competitiveness. Make sure collaboration is rewarded as much as individual success in order to ensure customer service heath.

That said, it isn’t too hard to implement gamification for your customer service center. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Set clear goals while implementing gamification—What do you want to achieve by implementing a game? Do you want your agents to solve more tickets, or do you want to focus on customer happiness? Keep these questions in mind while you’re considering gamification.
• While drafting your plans, keep the essence of customer service in mind. Focus on the factors that are beneficial to your contact center. For example, paying attention to the quality of your customer interactions instead of just the number of tickets can ensure that your agents resolve tickets properly instead of merely closing them.
• If you want agents to get to the hang of solving tickets quickly, then introducing gamification in the training stages can be very beneficial to help them acclimatize to the contact center environment.
• Keep an eye on the effectiveness of your games. Get feedback from your team to learn which type of games are more effective.

With these steps in hand, what are you waiting for? Follow these steps to earn the high score for customer service!