3 benefits of contact center gamification to improve agent performance

Developing happy and motivated agents reduces turnover, improves productivity, and leads to better, more personalized customer interactions.

If you evaluate the experiences you’ve had as a customer so far, how many situations can you think of that influenced you to stop working with a company? From inexperienced and unfriendly agents, to long wait times on hold, most of us can probably recall a few situations that have made us rethink our loyalty to a company.

In fact, a global survey from Talkdesk Research™ found that 49% of consumers have stopped working with a company after just one instance of poor customer service. But, what truly makes a good customer experience? According to those same consumers, easy interactions and quick resolutions are the key drivers of loyalty to a specific brand or company.

For contact centers to provide service that meets customer expectations, they need experienced, highly engaged agents with the right skills and knowledge to provide exceptional support. To develop a workforce that meets these criteria, contact centers need to deliver a great agent experience that helps motivate and retain their most important investment: their people. According to ICMI, agent satisfaction is one of the most important metrics that contact centers can focus on, because it directly influences all of the other KPIs related to customer experience, including customer satisfaction, agent absenteeism, and turnover.

While the benefits are clear, developing a motivated team of high-performing agents can be a challenging endeavor. Since the pandemic, employees have been moving from company to company faster than ever before, making it more difficult to retain experienced agents over time.  McKinsey reports that nearly half of customer care managers experienced increased attrition in 2021, which made it more difficult to provide great customer experiences in the face of rising customer demand. Adding to the challenge is the fact that onboarding new agents is expensive and time-consuming—it can take up to six months for agents to get up to speed and become fully contributing members of a team.

So, what can CX leaders do to reduce agent turnover and develop their teams more effectively? One strategy that’s becoming increasingly common is the use of gamification to boost agent engagement in the contact center. In fact, 73% of CX leaders expect to increase their use of gamification over the next three years. To understand why let’s explore some of the potential business benefits that engagement and gamification can provide for your contact center.