Gamifying customer service: level up your agents

The idea of gamifying customer service has been around for quite some time, and it has been adopted by many businesses around the world. Though it’s not new, the tried-and-true nature of it alone is enough for a lot of big businesses and start-ups alike.

The point of gamification is to introduce a point reward system to add a layer of game-like aspect to work and drive a little friendly competition among agents. When implemented the right way, it benefits both the agents in their drive to solve problems and customers who seek solutions to their problems.

Gamifying customer service is especially effective given the nature of the field. The work of a customer service agent is repetitive, and gamification fits this line of work like a glove: turning repetitive tasks into a series of points, progressions, and ultimately, rewards.

What is Gamification?

Gamification, in a nutshell, is the idea of taking the principles and frameworks of game design and layering them over real-world activities to make them more engaging and desirable. It has nothing to do with playing games at work, of course, so it’s a little bit of a misnomer. But, it has the characteristics and the elements that make billions of people around the world go “just one more level”. Applying these principles to repetitive tasks can vastly improve your agents’ performance and make the work itself a little game-like if you will.

Gamifying customer service is the process of encouraging agents to come up with their own self-managing ways. It lets your agents visualize the data of how they’re doing and adds transparency to it. At its core, gamification takes the elements of progression, leveling systems, optional objectives, achievements, checklists, and rewards and creates a “game” using existing activities. In other words, adding a little fun to the work itself; letting customer service agents enjoy their work while providing a better service to the customers.

What are the game mechanisms that can be applied to customer service?

The ultimate goal of gamifying customer service is creating a sense of satisfaction that comes with accomplishing a series of tasks. This is done by introducing clear-cut goals to work towards and a progression system to quantify the desired work.
Having clear goals act as an achievement. It’s something to work towards. Carrying out repetitive tasks over and over again can become meaningless and boring over time. Gamifying customer service tackles this problem by quantifying the work and the quality of the work by having a tangible point-based progression system.

Imagine you’re doing inventory and you have to scan the barcodes of a large number of items in a warehouse. Doing the same thing over and over again for hundreds of times becomes boring fast. But what if there was a progression system with a reward at the end? Seeing how you’re progressing through the required amount of scans and seeing how closer you’re getting to achieving that goal makes the whole task more engaging. A lot of mobile games use this mechanic and we all know how addictive they can be.

What are the benefits of gamifying customer service?

• Increased work satisfaction: Achieving a sense of accomplishment is a big deal. It gives agents recognition for their hard work that would be ephemeral otherwise. A collaborative goal makes the whole team connect more and encourage teamwork. Since the ultimate goal of the ‘game’ is to increase performance and efficiency, a little competition can yield great results as well.

• Customer satisfaction: Agents’ work satisfaction reflects on customer satisfaction. A happy agent is more likely to provide great customer service and go the extra mile. As customer satisfaction and customer service are hugely important for building brand loyalty and customer retention, gamifying customer service plays a huge role in customer satisfaction if done properly.

• Transparency: Gamifying customer service provides transparency in the form of data visualization. Each member of the team is eager to meet the goals and the additional progression systems can be used as a metric for each member and the team as a whole. This can be used in training sessions as you can have a clear view into the data at play and spot any weaknesses of your team.

A Rewarding Endeavor

This is a big opportunity for organizations that are looking to revamp and reorganize their customer service departments. Many global businesses have employed these techniques to great success and built self-sufficient customer service teams. Leveraging gamification to improve both the customer service team’s satisfaction and customer satisfaction is a win-win in this scenario, and should not be ignored.

To learn more about how to increase customer satisfaction, you can click here and read our blog about the power of adopting a positive attitude in customer service.