“Go to work, get me the Master Blaster Badge, my son told me last night and that’s why I have come to work today, it is my off day actually.” – said Sarla, walking up to my co-founder, Carl who was in conversation with the head of operations, Sunil (name changed for privacy purposes), taking both of them completely by surprise.
Sarla was a call center agent in one of our MNC banking client’s customer services call center which was transitioning from a cost center to a profit center. With sales metrics now becoming a part of the core KPIs, the existing large body of pure customer services agents needed to make new neural learning connections, overcome their fear of sales, and learn new selling skills. Suddenly faced with complete conceptual change, most agents reacted from the limbic brain leading to passive resistance. This was becoming a major roadblock, the transition was becoming a slow and tedious process.
We were brought in to make the transition easier, bring is a cultural and mindset shift using gamification as a lever. This was within the month of our gamification strategy and platform implementation.
“I can’t believe what I just heard, how did this happen?!”, said Sunil looking nonplussed and pleasantly surprised at Sarla as she walked away towards her workstation. Sarla was, at best, an average performer on the floor. She was not known as a person who ever took the initiative or for that matter showed much drive.
This is where, I think, we had our first major learning as gamification evangelists, which has become the founding principle of TGC Ethos of Gamification.
TGC Ethos 1: Every individual has a potential, Gamification optimizes THE POTENTIAL of the individual.
As appreciative inquiry practitioners, we took a different approach towards implementing the gamification strategy in the call center.
We looked at the performance distribution on the floor, broke it down into quartiles, and set stretch targets accordingly. We backed that up by aligning our platform game mechanics to the quartiles, which included points, badges, leaderboards and rewards.
What that did, whilst the sense of competition was retained, it levelled the playing field between the naturally top performers and the average/below average performers. In the conventional approach, the latter when compared to the best would lose motivation right at the outset, leading to limbic brain responses – resistance and disengagement.
This simple approach generated self-motivation, confidence and a sense of achievement led by a belief that ‘I have potential, I can push myself to achieve my potential and that I will be rewarded for achieving my potential.’
By gamifying the belief, we helped agents develop their own visions of success and an innate desire to learn new skills to achieve that vision.
Call centers are led and run by humans, subsequently, call center gamification should naturally be human focused design, aimed at recognizing the potential in the human and help in optimizing the same.