Gamification Organizational Benefits

By Barton Goldenberg

In my previous Gamification – related blog post, I discussed how Gamification can benefit an organization for its Social CRM efforts. Now, I will describe two additional examples of how Gamification can benefit an organization towards employee satisfaction and customer relations.

1. Lower Contact Center agent turnover

In general, Contact Centers are staffed with agents in low-paying positions who often must deal with unhappy customers in stressful situations.  This leads to unhappiness at work and in turn poor servicing of customers. It also leads to high turnover rates in the Contact Center – often in excess of 20% per year in many centers.

Gamification introduces fun into Contact Center agent’s work.  Agents earn points for example by hitting performance goals, achieving training certifications as well as interacting with others in the internal Gamification community.  Agents can also earn merit ‘badges’ to signify accomplished training and performance goals.  Profile pages and leaderboards can show agents where they stand.  All this leads to friendly competition among Contact Center agents, which generates a win-win situation whereby agent satisfaction increases, they treat customers better, customer satisfaction goes up, etc.

A certain Cloud Contact Center organization that I have worked with uses a Gamification application – called “My Work Community”, whereby agents:

• Earn points by hitting performance goals, completing certifications, and interacting with the community
• Apply for certain opportunities, choice of shift, etc.
• Receive badges that signify accomplished training and performance goals
• Can see where they stand from profile pages and leaderboards

The results-to-date for this Gamification application has been quite impressive:

• 80% of agents opted to the Gamification program; 75% of them returning on a bi-weekly basis
• 72% of agents completed non-required certifications, motivatged by Gamification mechanics
• The onboarding process for a new client decreased from 4 weeks of training to 14 hours
• Service levels improved by about 10%
• Average time to handle a customer inquiry decreased by almost 15%
• Sales performance improved 8-12%

2. Deepen Customer Engagement

I am working with a global hotel chain to help create an online game application that encourages their rewards members to spend their reward points.  By spending their reward points, these members have the opportunity to visit global properties where they receive very meaningful promotions to stay at these properties in the future.   This game application serves two purposes: it helps members learn more about the hotel’s properties and provides them with meaningful discounts, and it helps the hotel to lower the growing number of redeemable reward points that they must honor in the future.

In the ISM next blog post, ISM will have other guest blog piece by Nick Rojas concerning using Artificial Intelligence to improve customer acquisition.

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Barton Goldenberg, is the founder and president of ISM Inc., customer-centric strategists/implementers serving best-in-class organizations globally. As a CRM leader for 30 years, he was among the first three inductees in the CRM Hall of Fame. Recognized as a leading “customer-focused” author, his latest book, The Definitive Guide to Social CRM, is hailed as the roadmap for Social CRM success. Barton is a popular speaker on “maximizing customer relationships to gain market insights, customers and profits”.