As Easter approaches, it’s now official that spring has sprung. The new financial year has begun. And it’s time for a fresh start. So, the businesses need to come out of their hibernate mode and shake things up a bit.
Now that won’t be much of a difficulty for the businesses. There are always some major areas that can welcome a few changes. For example, in BPOs, employee attrition is a pressing issue. Every year thousands of BPO employees leave an organization to join another, and at the same time, switch careers.
So what is this reason behind such a high rate of attrition? Lack of engagement is one of the major reasons behind this. Believe it or not, a section of your employees are completely disengaged. They neither share the company perspective nor bring something to the table to enhance the outlook. They just clock in and clock out while not contributing substantially.
As a result, the entire operation of a BPO faces problems. When these non-engaged employees commune with the customers, they are not able to build a strong bond. As a result, the optimum level customer satisfaction is not met.
Did you know that about half members of your workforce is probably not engaged? According to a semi-annual Employment Engagement Index by Gallup Management Journal:
- Only 13% of employees round the world are actively engaged in their jobs. They are passionate about their organization and help move the organization forward.
- 63% employees are not engaged and put no passion into their work. They remain active but accomplish nothing to benefit the company.
- 24% employees are actively disengaged and busy venting and showing their unhappiness, which in turn, undermines what their engaged co-workers are trying to accomplish.
In a competitive world, customer satisfaction often has the final words in the purchase decision. Therefore, it is very important. And to achieve the level of satisfaction, it is essential that each of the contact center employees is highly motivated and give their 100% to the job.
Gamify Your Employee Engagement Strategy
Now, the most important question remains – how to re-engage these employees? There are several ways. But so far, applying gamification techniques to re-engage staff has worked wonders for most companies.
Let’s face it, what does an employee want most out of his job? Money? No. They want recognition, appreciation and rewards. These are some great motivators that can surely engage employees.
A report from Cognizant rightly points out that gamification is as much needed in terms of employee engagement as it is needed to increase customer engagement. Today, the SMAC stack or social, mobile, analytics and cloud technology has opened new opportunities for engaging customers through various channels. A company can also use the similar channels to engage employees. Here are a few examples:
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- The Marriott Group uses My Marriott Hotel Facebook game for recruitment. Similar to FarmVille, the game requires job aspirants to manage the hotel’s kitchen operations, earning or losing points based on customer satisfaction. This way, the company can attract and recruit talented employees.
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- Target stores have implemented a game for their cashiers to play when checking people out. It shows the cashier that whether the item that was just scanned in the optimum time. Then they can see their score on screen and know whether they are using their time optimally.
- Some organizations create interesting festivity games like the Easter egg hunt to keep the employees engaged and share the results of each level of the game on social media tagging the winners. This gives the employees a sense of belonging, which in turn help them reconnect with the company.
At Fusion CX, we keep our agents engaged with regular feedback, interesting games and other fun activities and we feature our winners on our social media pages.
For Easter, you can have some special gamification plans. Such as –
- Revamping the game ‘Steal the Egg’ to suit the office environment. Every agent will have their own basket of eggs and when one makes an upsell, they will be free to steal one egg from another. At the end of the day, the one with the highest number of eggs will get a special prize.
- You may also put a large egg basket with the amount of money written in the eggs. For each successful sales, agents will be allowed to take one egg and will be rewarded the money immediately.
- You can also play the game while replacing the money with experience – ‘Can go home 2 hour early’, ‘Gets a Domino’s gift voucher’, ‘Wins a free trip for two to an amusement park’, ‘Gets to play the role of Team Leader for one day’ and so on. It is often said that the employees love experiences more than money. It’s time to test that faith.
A survey by the Aberdeen Group found that organizations who set up gamification improve engagement by 48% and turnover by 36%. Therefore, this Easter, businesses should start fresh and gamify their processes to engage their employees, which in turn will bring them better turnover and heightened customer satisfaction.
