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Building a Culture of Success with an Advanced Cloud Contact Center

This article was published on August 3, 2021

Businesses know that providing a top-quality customer experience is more important than ever. Along the way, many of them are leveraging the capabilities of an advanced cloud contact center to build a culture of success in the enterprise.

Gamification can help improve employee engagement and reduce burnout in a cloud contact center.

One key feature that the contact center provides — gamification — can be especially instrumental in helping organizations achieve better employee engagement, which contributes to a culture of success and boosts the bottom line. As Gartner reports, companies with a highly engaged workforce enjoy a 147 percent uptick in revenue while observing 25 to 65 percent less turnover. Here's how gamification helps makes such breakthroughs possible.

Envisioning a Culture of Success

A culture of success is a shared organizational mindset in which the entire company, from executive leadership right down to newly welcomed employees, collectively strives to raise the bar. Rather than being content with what it has accomplished to date, the company assumes an active posture in which every department builds upon its past successes to achieve new heights.

As part of this ongoing endeavor, the company commits to measuring and evaluating its progress in key areas such as employee turnover and customer engagement. Armed with such insights, the organization can confirm that it is, in fact, moving the needle forward and advancing toward greater success. Gamification helps the contact center support these goals and more.

Playing to Win with Cloud Contact Center Gamification

Gamification infuses healthy competition into a process that might otherwise be mundane. The contact center can involve long hours spent performing rote, repetitive tasks while servicing clients that may be frustrated, eventually leading to employee burnout if not thoughtfully managed. That's why it's ripe for positive disruption. When done right, contact center gamification delivers direct benefits to both the company and its employees.

On the business side, gamification improves employee performance, spurs greater customer engagement, generates increased sales revenues, and improves compliance. With agents motivated to secure a top spot on the leaderboard, absenteeism drops. Gamification can even be used to accelerate employee onboarding, helping new hires bond with the team and get excited about their work. It can also help new employees retain information faster, making the contact center more nimble as it smoothly integrates new agents in less time.

On the employee side, gamification often leads to greater employee satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment among the team, which often results in more successful interactions with customers. One major challenge that contact center agents encounter is a sense of isolation — that they are cut off from their colleagues as they perform their solitary tasks. By its very nature, gamification brings groups together toward a common goal and helps employees understand their role in advancing the work of the contact center. It also offers them regular opportunities to celebrate their accomplishments, leading to improved employee satisfaction and retention.

Achievement Unlocked: How Contact Center Gamification Works

So how does gamification work? Just like in a game, it comes down to competition. Contact center agents compete with one another to complete specific tasks, striving to earn a coveted position on the leaderboard. As the competition gets underway, agents' scores are displayed in real time on computers, mobile devices, and sometimes even projectors within the office. Successful agents are often awarded badges, recognition within the company, or trophies. Groups can even compete with each other to add a fun twist, boosting the collaborative benefits of gamification even further.

Gamification is often structured around key performance indicators (KPIs), such as first call resolution and average speed to answer a call, to ensure that the contact center meets its most critical objectives. Your company can design metrics that correspond with its current business priorities, adjusting them as necessary as it proceeds. These metrics should be quantitative rather than qualitative. That way, you can ensure that the contact center's efforts are aligned with business goals. That's fundamental for fostering a culture of success, and it sets your employees up to enjoy the satisfaction such success can bring at both the individual and organizational level.

Driving Engagement and Efficiency

For maximum success, gamification should be undertaken with specific business goals backed by concrete analytics. At a minimum, this requires an advanced cloud contact center solution that can consistently reports agent metrics. Company culture plays a pivotal role in gamification, too: It's important to foster a spirit of healthy competition among agents, not a bitter rivalry. If agents perceive that they are competing with each other in a punitive environment, the tension that arises will inevitably impact collaboration and employee satisfaction.

It's also important to consider your company's cultural comfort with transparency. Everyone's statistics will be publicly available, and some employees may be uncomfortable with that at first. Accordingly, thoughtful change management may be in order where this is concerned, but there's also an opportunity: Transparency helps create buy-in among employees who see a merit-based competition as inherently fair and objective. As a result, they are much more likely to join in celebrating contact center agents who excel.

With the marketplace becoming more competitive, customer engagement is a high priority. This requires better employee engagement, and that's where gamification comes in. Highly engaged contact center agents have a proven track record of driving sales and improving customer retention and efficiency, all while experiencing greater satisfaction on the job thanks to a fun work environment that celebrates their accomplishments. That's a win-win both companies and their employees can applaud.

Interested in learning more about how a cloud-based contact center can benefit your company? See what Vonage Business can do for you.

Vonage Staff

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