Workforce Management Featured Article
Consider Gamification to Improve Onboarding in the Contact Center
In the contact center, recruiting and hiring tend to take the lion’s share of time and attention. It’s easy to forget, therefore, about the importance of onboarding and training to ensure that a new hire feels confident and supported in the new job. Good onboarding has the potential to drive down turnover numbers significantly, and boost customer satisfaction. After all, who wants to let untrained agents loose on your best customers?
What is Onboarding?
Simply put, it’s the paces you put a new hire through on their first days in the job. It’s a significant driver of training, company culture and future employee performance.
“Onboarding can place new recruits on the fast track to productivity by speeding up the orientation as well as the learning process of how to do their jobs,” wrote Gal Rimon for eLearning Industry. “However, it is much more than that. It affords organizations with a way to meaningfully engage them and to convey the corporate culture, brand, and goals. By so doing, employees are quicker to feel that they belong and are more likely to stay.”
Consider Gamification
Every company has different onboarding practices, from requiring recruits to mentor with experienced agents to classroom training to asking them to read reams of paper manuals. If your onboarding practices aren’t what they could be, consider a “gamified” approach. Gamification is the practice of bringing video-game like interfaces and activities to the software agents use. In the contact center, though, it’s important to emphasize team building, however, rather than competition with other agents, which could lead to unwanted agent behaviors.
“You can use gamification for e-learning and onboarding but be sure to remove the temptation to cheat and the discouragement of failing,” wrote Rimon. “Replace them with mechanics that reward completion and give employees the feeling of personal satisfaction and accomplishment. In fact, enterprise gamification’s ability to encourage people to implement certain tasks (e.g., watching a presentation or taking a course) makes it a perfect platform for call center onboarding and many other e-learning tasks.”
Why Does It Work?
Simply put, humans are creatures of habit, social media behavior tells us we like rewards. By aligning this desire for awards with learning and accomplishment, contact centers can encourage new employees to position themselves to succeed. Gamification is a good way to recognize and reward positive agent performance, which contributes to the quality of the overall contact center culture.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
