5 call center gamification ideas that boost your agents' motivation

Agent motivation and churn are major concerns in the call center industry. Use these gamification ideas to support your agents in staying effective and satisfied.

Call center work can be stressful and hectic. Agents go through repetitive conversations while trying to close as many deals as possible. The agents’ motivation is often tested and a prolonged lack of stimuli can result in agent churn and ineffective campaigns.

Call center gamification means setting up competitions and other competitive elements designed to make work feel more like play. Used right, gamification can

• boost sales
• reduce churn
• improve agent motivation
• build the overall team spirit of your operation.

Ideally, you should choose use a call center software that allows you to gamify your operation easily and effectively, such as LeadDesk and its Superstars add-on.

Call center gamification ideas with proven results

Adopt these gamification ideas to take your sales operation to the next level.

1. Sales Bingo

Call centers usually have hard sales campaigns where agents or teams may need some encouragement for them to do well. Everyone knows bingo, so why not turn it into a sales competition?

List the sales goals or KPIs that need a boost and place them on a bingo grid. Whenever agents or teams reach an individual sales goal, reward them with a small prize, such as a free lunch. When an agent or a team gets bingo, reward them with a bigger bonus, such as hotel stays or days off.

2. Dirty Santa

Are your agents concentrating only on low-hanging fruits and lagging behind on those juicy but rewarding deals? Study your call center data and define an ambitious price point where you would like to see improvement. Then get a collection of gifts for your agents to compete for.

Every time an agent or team makes a sale over the set amount, they get a gift. The catch is that everyone has to show the gifts they receive to other agents and teams, who then get to decide whether they want to try to steal an unwrapped gift or open a new one.

This competition gives your agents autonomy over their actions in the competition. It also provides the thrill of not knowing what the unwrapped prizes are.

This keeps your agents aiming higher while competing for the best gifts. You are most likely to see a hefty increase in larger deals.

3. Sales Contests for Time Off

If your call center has periodical quotas that agents should meet, they probably work vigorously to reach that target. After reaching the target, however, they might think that it’s better to save their end-of-the-month deals for the next period to ensure they reach the goal then too.

To boost end-of-the-month sales, spontaneously announce that there’s a new shared extra quota for the last days of the period. If the whole operation or campaign team can reach the goal in the final days of the period, they all get to leave early on Friday or come late on a low-volume day.

This way deals may start dropping out of nowhere instead of every agent having individual plans for their quotas. Also, your team has to work together to reach the goal, which should result in sharing knowledge and better team spirit.

4. Buddy up

Does your sales operation have big variance in skills or sales scores? Would you like to see the best skills of the best agents trickle down to newcomers and average-performing agents? It’s time to buddy up!

Make pairs or small teams from agents of different skill and experience levels. Have them work together towards a common goal and reward the best teams at the end of the competition period.

Your less experienced agents are bound to learn effective sales methods. Working together also tightens the bond between your agents, making it easier to work effectively in a sales team in the future.

5. Charity fundraising

Not every motivational game has to be about individual profit. Just like everyone else, call center agents enjoy contributing to an important cause.

Let your agents vote on a charity they’d like to donate to. Then let them know the sales campaigns and thresholds that determine how much money goes to the charity.

Every time a team reaches a new goal, the company donates a designated sum to a charity. The team that donates the most money in a given period wins.

This game has no losers. Even the last-placed team is still contributing to a common cause. Working together as a team, your agents also learn the effectiveness of teamwork.

How to get started with call center gamification?

If gamification isn’t a regular part of your operation, we recommend starting with a holistic service that does most of the planning and execution work for you. LeadDesk’s Superstars is an easy-to-use gamification add-on that allows you to

• set individual targets for campaigns, teams and agents
• visualize targets and performance in real-time
• access games, stats and reports on every device
• report accurately.

Our blog provides valuable tips on aspects to consider when starting call center gamification. You can also learn more about LeadDesk’s cloud-based outbound sales software.