Gamification and the Customer Experience
Datagamz Gamification and the Customer Experience
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Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.
Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.
Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.
Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.
Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.
When managing a call centre, you need to know the most effective ways to measure your agent’s performance, productivity and how well they’re satisfying your customers. Metrics provide a reliable method of tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and will aid in steering your agents to achieve a common goal for the business. There are many metrics you can use to measure your call centre’s performance, however, some are more important and provide more informative data for you to interpret and implement change accordingly. Here are the top 7 metrics you should consider using to measure your call centre performance. Related Article: Performance Management – 8 Tips To Boost Your Call Centre
This is one of the most important measures of performance in your call centre. You want to provide the best customer experience possible otherwise it’s likely your customers may look elsewhere and buy from your competitor instead of you!
After-call customer surveys – A post-call survey or follow-up email survey asks customers to rate their recent interaction with your call centre. The advantages of using this form of satisfaction rating is that they are relatively easy to get up and running, it is low cost and it requires no extra data from the customer. However, there are a couple of disadvantages which may make you rethink whether after-call customer surveys are the best option. The cons are that surveys:
Using Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics to measure customer satisfaction will be highly beneficial to ensure your customer receives a good experience and your call centre is likely to become more efficient and profitable.
As mentioned above, First-Call Resolution (FCR) is a popular and widely used KPI that influences the customer’s experience. FCR measures agent productivity and effectiveness by calculating the percentage of incoming calls that are resolved entirely on the first instance. If a customer has to call back numerous times or is handled by too many agents, it will decrease your FCR and customer satisfaction rates.
Related Article: 13 Methods for Increasing Employee Engagement Using First-Call Resolution (FCR) to measure how well your call centre is performing will be beneficial to the bottom line as well as ensuring your employees are engaged.
Average handle time or AHT is another one of the most important metrics used to measure your call centres’ performance and productivity. AHT is the average time spent on the phone call from when the agent picks up to when the agent disconnects the call with the customer. Call centre managers take careful consideration and aim to decrease the AHT due to direct link this metric has to decreasing costs and increasing profitability. It is important to measure not just how long the agent spent with the customer but also how short the call may be. If the call is too short it may mean the customer has not received enough assistance about the product or service. Monitoring the call quality is how you can discover whether your agents are delivering the right amount of assistance to your customers.
Using AHT to measure how well your agents are providing assistance to your customers is a crucial metric when assessing your call centres performance.
When measuring the productivity of your call centre, one of the best metrics to measure the performance of your agents is the average speed of answer or ASA. ASA is calculated by dividing Total Wait Time for all Answered Calls by Total Number of Answered Calls. The lower the ASA, the less time customers spend waiting for their calls to be answered. It is crucial to have a lower ASA because it also lowers the occurrence of the Abandonment Rate and increases the CSAT scores.
Average Speed of Answer (ASA) is an essential call centre metric because it fundamentally is about getting a customer’s issues resolved as quickly as possible. Your ASA target should be aligned to your operational and strategic goals. Are your targets working towards achieving these goals or are they unaligned?
Shinkage is a commonly used metric to measure the time an agent is not contributing towards workload. Shrinkage impacts the overall efficiency of a call centre and needs to be continually monitored and measured to ensure shrinkage can be reduced where possible. Shrinkage can be calculated by summing the total paid time in an activity not contributing towards workload divided by the total paid time.
Related Article: 13 Methods for Increasing Employee Engagement Because call centre shrinkage directly impacts the productivity of your call centre it is imperative to monitor the rate on a regular basis so that the call centre can reach the business goals of the company.
Employee Attrition Rate or Turnover is a commonly used measure that tracks the number of people that leave your contact centre. There are two types of turnover: staff choosing to leave and staff being asked to leave.
High turnover is fairly common in the call centre industry however there are ways to help mitigate some of the issues surrounding why an employee leaves a job.
Your employee attrition rate directly impacts the profitability of your call centre because it is expensive to hire and train new employees. Understanding why your turnover rate is high or low is an important metric when managing any call centre.
Abandonment Rate is the number of customer calls that hang-up before they get connected to an agent. The Abandonment Rate is calculated by dividing Abandoned Calls by Total Offered Calls. A lower abandon rate indicates a faster rate of answering the call. Abandonment Rate is linked to ASA.
Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.
Productivity is the key focus of any business and a call centre is no different. The more productive an agent is at a call centre, the more they contribute towards the performance management goals of the organisation. For call centres, as they are a service-centric business, it is very important to assess the performance of the employees to ensure that you are best utilising their talent. Performance Management broadly means how well you can maintain the talent in your organisation and what processes you follow and practices you adopt to get the best performance from agents. The more you are able to strike a balance between the skills you have and the roles of the agents, the more productive your business becomes. Call centre performance management, however, cannot be achieved overnight. It is a continuous process that brings efficacy to the organisation and ensures optimum utilisation of resources.
When you ask an agent at your call centre about their job description, are they able to offer an answer without hesitation? In most cases, agents have ambiguity about their expected role. When the agent does not know what is expected of them, how can they perform at par with expectations?
Just like no two jobs are the same, no two agents have the same skill set. It is very important that you place importance on individuality and follow different approaches while dealing with different agents. While you might already have set the KPIs and the benchmarks to be achieved, in your call centre, you cannot expect two individuals to reach there in the same way. Agents may act differently in situations due to their level of experience and their aspects of their personality.
Besides setting a strategy for the team performance, it is important to have a customised approach for each and every agent because of the many different levels of ability in the key areas mentioned.
Related Blog – 13 Effective Methods To Increase Employee Engagement
While feedback is a tool that you can utilise, it is important that you balance it well. You must notify the agent about their performance and development in a stipulated time, but ensure that your feedback encourages a positive outcome.
If you want a great team of performing agents, you must prove yourself as a good leader first. By ensuring that you support your agents in their development, you can expect great outcomes in return. If you do not engage in the right behaviour, you cannot expect your associates to perform. Always remember that your associates will follow what you do. It is recommended that you follow what you preach and set examples of good behaviour and performance for the team to follow. Similarly, strong relationships with your team can give a manager more influence and therefore more power to drive performance. Together, a great leader with good relationships with their team is much more likely to achieve objectives, reduce attrition and increase customer service. As a great leader, you must focus on:
Emphasise developing the key skills of each agent and utilise it as a strength for the call centre. Being supportive of each agent’s personal goals offers an opportunity of a positive career path with your organisation and will help to ensure your top performing agents stay with your organisation.
Irrespective of the department type, size, and nature, you must ensure that the performance management process is the same for everyone. Obviously, the KPIs would be different for various roles, but all employees must know there is a standard performance management process to follow. One example is a scheduled performance review every three months for every employee. How will it help you? Well, with the same performance management process, the employees will stay abreast of the ongoing changes and expectations from them. This way, irrespective of the team they are transferred to, they will be able to deliver results and stay on track with performance targets. Another advantage of uniformity is that if the team remains the same, but the team leader is changed, the agents won’t find it tough to align with the new goals set as the performance management processes would remain the same.
Call centres often set Sales targets as a KPI, and agents chasing the targets can overlook the quality they deliver to the customer. This is not the best practice for a good performance management process. Instead of focusing on sales, the call centres must prioritise the feedback an agent receives from the customers and set them as a KPI.
Whilst it is important to recognise your top performers, there needs to be a process to recognise positive gains for any underperformers too. Examples of incentives that can motivate your call centre team:
A key goal of setting incentives is to help the agents develop. If you aren’t getting the right outcome, it is better to invest in a better developmental activity, such as additional training, rather than handing out incentives.
A business has access to a range of performance management tools and it is expected from them to make the best use of it. From organising employee engagement games to offering the employees access to the performance management software to keep track of their developmental progress, there is a range of tools that call centres can use to manage employee performance. Datagamz provides a gamification and analytics platform to help you to track performance and KPIs. It offers a method of incentivising your employees through rewards, quizzes and challenges. You can make use of technology in a way that it offers the best benefits to your employees whilst also managing performance goals. Performance management is crucial for an organisation and the leader is a key part of the entire process. By working closely with the agents, helping them identify the goals and offering feedback when required, a manager can ensure that the best performance is delivered by the team. This will not only ensure that the organisation performs well but also ensure that the agents have connectivity with the call centre and associate themselves with having longevity within the business.
Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.
Point blank – employee engagement is the most important aspect you should be looking to improve because if you’re not looking after your employees, your organisation will not thrive. Organisations rely, more than ever, on their employee’s motivation and performance to reach their business goals and to be successful. (I want to skip straight to the steps for increasing employment engagement!) This finding by Gallup suggests that more highly engaged employees resulted in a 21% increase in profitability. An organisation with high employee engagement is more likely to increase:
Organisations that have a high percentage of employee engagement gain an edge over their competition. Shrm outlines the key differences between engaged and disengaged employees. Engaged employees are optimistic, team orientated, solution-orientated, selfless, show a willingness to learn and accept blame while passing on credit. Overall an engaged employee is more likely to have better:
Disengaged employees display a pessimistic attitude, can be self-centred, are often absent, have a negative attitude, do not show passion for learning and accept credit but pass along blame. Employee engagement is an approach which is based on a two-way commitment between the organisation and the employee. The aim is to provide an employee with the right role, responsibilities, environment and culture so they are well equipped to perform their best at work.
When companies place employees in the wrong role, due to reasons such as growth and unexpected employee losses, it can lead to rushed hiring decisions and therefore a selection of the wrong person for the role. An employee can feel under-utilised or conversely over-worked if placed in a role that is not suitable for their experience level and personal preference. Plus hiring the wrong person for the role could cost your organisation over $200,000!
There’s nothing worse than starting a new job and not being provided with up to date training and information required to get started Those first few weeks for a new employee are crucial in making them feel like they made the right choice in deciding to work for your organisation.
Ask your employees if they want to work on particular projects or tasks. Understanding how an employee fits with an organisation’s future is one of the key employee engagement drivers that has the biggest impact. If your employees see longevity within your organisation, they are more likely to have higher engagement and therefore remain in the organisation for longer.
Related Blog – Performance Management – 8 Tips To Boost Your Call Centre
Managers need to know how to effectively assign responsibility, but with many never receiving proper training in delegation, this can be seen as a big downfall for an organisations’ employee engagement. Asking “Who can do this task?” and then providing proper guidance and monitoring progress once the task is delegated is crucial to keeping employees on track and engaged. Shrm outlines a checklist to prepare for delegation to ensure that employees feel equipped to take on responsibility. Your delegation checklist should include:
In contact centres, where much of the work is repetitive and sometimes mundane, keeping employees engaged is critical to reducing attrition and increasing quality of work. Gamification platforms such as Datagamz, allows managers and team leaders to delegate tasks to agents and makes tasks more interesting by turning employees into gamers. Productive behaviour is rewarded by earning points and a visual leaderboard promotes healthy competition among employees.
Be loud and proud about wanting to improve employee engagement in the workplace. Send internal emails to employees outlining what steps you are taking to improve employee engagement. Maintaining transparency means the team can help encourage fellow colleagues to work together to increase engagement.
Transparency can be achieved and is a very powerful enabler that can aid in increasing your employee’s engagement.
The need to be a more flexible organisation with regards to working arrangements is ever increasing due to the increase in daily pressures, stressors and a change in people’s lifestyles.
A flexible work arrangement for your employees is likely to boost engagement and performance due to the extra benefits your employees will receive.
However, you want to ensure your employees are continuing to work effectively in their flexible working arrangements.
Having a flexible working schedule combined with the right tools can be very beneficial to increasing your organisation’s employee productivity as well as their engagement.
One study showed that up to 70% of employees improve their physical surroundings in their working environment to increase healthy behaviours.
Organisations that care for their employees, which are their most valuable asset, are more likely to achieve success because their employees have a better work-life balance. Activities such as encouraging your employees to attend a weekly exercise class before or after their workday can inspire your employees to increase their healthy lifestyle behaviours. Additionally, this is an excellent way to give your employees the opportunity to get to know their colleagues better.
As part of your wellness initiative, encouraging your employees to take breaks is crucial to prevent burnout and decrease associated health issues. Regular breaks give your employee a rest from eye strain, if working on a computer, and muscle fatigue or strain. A 5-10 minute break can help restore concentration and it provides enough time for a stretch.
Whether the check-ins are casual or scheduled, don’t forget to have regular check-ins to see how your employees are tracking. One study showed that when an employee feels like their voice is heard, they are 4.6 times more likely to perform better work. This is why it is important to have an open conversation about their progress and career goals.
Make sure you end the meeting on a positive note, try to make your employee feel optimistic going forward, even if the chat was focused on some not-so-good news.
Regularly asking your team how they think you’re going as a manager can promote a great working relationship and develop your managerial skills. Feedback can be anonymous or an open discussion. Because you’re being transparent about employee engagement, ask your employees how you think the new initiatives are going! One study found that 89% of HR leaders agreed that ongoing feedback and check-ins are crucial for success.
When an employee does a good job, ensure you let them know! A thoughtful reward for an employee can boost productivity and engagement. Recognition makes people feel good about themselves and their work, so ensuring you provide positive reinforcements is crucial to increasing your employees’ motivation.
A gamification platform such as Datagamz can be a useful tool to reward
employees that work in contact centres and back-office environments. Learn more about how Datagamz could help to boost your employee engagement.
Boost team morale and increase workplace culture by having a regular social catch up or activity. Whether it be Friday drinks, lunches or a sport, providing the team with time to bond over something that is not work-related will be beneficial for increasing your employee engagement.
Our at Datagamz mission is to radically improve the engagement and capability of contact centre teams by helping them connect better with each other and with customers. Understanding what motivates and engages individual team members and provides a sense of accomplishment and pride is critical to improving each individuals performance and the overall customer experience. Datagamz Gamification platform translates behaviours that will improve productivity into badges, quests and challenges for individuals and teams. Datagamz Analytics offers four new powerful techniques to help uncover and leverage insights into productivity and performance.
Finally get the results you’re after, and build the high-performing culture you’ve been waiting for today.