Publications
Partners
Cape Town – Let’s play a game: Pretend your staff always came to work on time; pretend they were satisfied when their salaries were paid, pretend they were working to their potential. Ready? Let’s play.
Gamification is a word many businesses have heard of, but changing their operations to focus on what sounds like a game probably sounds futuristic at best and perhaps too much fun for a serious platform.
A local expert said gamification was basically a system to measure live performance while encouraging higher levels of productivity, especially within the call centre environment.
In this story:
- AUDIO: Fin24’s Matthew le Cordeur speaks to 1Stream director Bruce von Maltitz.
- VIDEO: 1Stream director Bruce von Maltitz explains the use of gamification in call centres.
- PDF: Link to the white paper on gamification.
White paper on gamification
Hosted technology provider 1Stream released a white paper outlining the potential for gamification technologies in South African contact centres.
It served as a guide to provide a glimpse into how gamification was shaping business, what it could offer the contact centre in particular, and what senior management could take into account when implementing the approach.
Von Maltitz said gamification was not meant to be used as a quick fix and it took commitment from senior management.
“Critics believe that it is a form of manipulation, patronising to people who are good at what they do,” he said. “They have a point. Gamification must offer real, measurable value to the people who use it on a daily basis.”
Listen:
The white paper touches on:
- Fun and games in the contact centre: creating a leader board where call centre staff can advance by completing calls in a set time, completing training modules or helping others.
- Gamification for training: Staff can complete training modules in their own time and can include quizzes, levels of training and score cards.
- Boosting motivation and loyalty: It measures and rewards progress in real time, enabling people to take pride in what they are good at.
- Driving innovation: games can be set up to promote sharing of innovative ideas.
- Importance of leadership: Implementing gamification takes true leadership from management.
- It’s about empowering, not manipulating: It must offer real, measurable value to the people who use it.
Watch:
Managing productivity
“You want to get the most out of your staff,” he told Fin24.
He said managers measured various things that focus on the productivity of staff, such as attendance, the time you arrived and left work, and the amount of time spent logged in.
“They have to balance that on the quality side as well,” he said. “They have to listen to recordings, they have to rate those recordings, give you a score of what you actually said. They have to look at your customers satisfaction scores.
“They are doing all of these things, but gamification is just a mechanism to pull all of those together and kind of almost create a leader board and give it instant recognition,” he said. “So you understand where you are all the time.
“It has to happen instantaneously. It doesn’t help if you sit down with the person at the end of the month and say, ‘right, let’s see what happened here’. You need a mechanism to do that and gamification provides that.
“It also provides information that management can quickly use to manage that environment.”
Download:
The white paper on gamification.
- Fin24
Consider yourself an entrepreneurial hero? Or just have something on your mind? Add your voice to our Small Business Centre:
* Write a guest post
* Share a personal story
* Ask the experts
