5 Call Center Contest Ideas to Motivate Your Team

Call center work can be repetitive and it is often challenging to keep motivation and engagement levels high among employees. Contests are a great way to introduce gamification into daily activities. They work well to track goals and engage employees, and have the added bonus of boosting productivity and building camaraderie among teammates.

What is Gamification?

Gamification, simply put, is the application of game elements to other contexts. In the workplace gamification can be introduced into daily activities to boost engagement and motivation. It can be particularly effective in settings like call centers to improve engagement with repetitive tasks.

Read more about gamification for call centers.

Contests are a tried and true example of gamification in the workplace. Here are 5 call center contest ideas to jumpstart motivation for your teams!

1. Survivor

This is a creative and fun call center contest idea. To recreate this game in a call center, simply split agents into teams and decide on a specific challenge for each day. These can vary depending on where you want to see improvement. Try measuring different metrics such as customer feedback, quality scores, or handling times.

Let the teams know the challenge for the day in advance so that they can meet before starting each day to put together a strategy. By the end of the shift, the team in first place receives a reward or the highest number of points. Losing teams each have to eliminate a team member. All eliminated team members then form a new team to compete on the following day.

This is a dynamic kind of contest that is great for larger groups. It keeps everyone involved, and encourages team bonding. Setting daily milestones and prizes in addition to overall scores allows lots of chances for different teams to be recognized. At the end of the contest you can choose to reward the agent or team that has the most points.

Setting goals for your contest

Whenever you are running a contest for your call center team, make sure to set goals that are clear, attainable, and productive. Clear means that it is easy to see an impact on the metrics you are measuring. Often metrics that are directly associated with an activity work well. Some examples include: Number of phone calls made, Number of cases closed, Call Handling time. Metrics like Quality Score, or 1st call resolution rate are also good, but often it is harder to see an impact in the span of a contest. Attainable means that any benchmark or goal you set will probably be met within the span of the contest. Productive means that the metrics measured for the contest serve your overall business goals. Choose areas that need improvement or extra focus to get the best results.

2. The Wheel of Wow

Much like the classic show, Wheel of Fortune, this game uses a wheel divided into various categories with prizes. To get to spin the wheel, employees with performance metrics (ex. first call resolution rate) above a certain level are nominated by their peers. This contest not only motivates employees to improve, but also recognizes a different team member each day. Be sure to include interesting prizes to boost morale and increase engagement!

Tracking Progress

To keep engagement levels high throughout the game, make sure you keep track of the time remaining and individual or team scores. Visual progress trackers are key to let participants know where they stand. Digital Leaderboards are a great way to make sure everyone is kept up to date in real time.

3. Call Center Olympics

This call center contest idea is great for recognizing individual agents. Select a few metrics agents will compete on as the different events and establish the period of time for the games.

The person who gets the best score in each metric gets a medal or ribbon to recognize their performance. Once the Olympics come to an end, throw a party to celebrate your employees’ performance and name the top three overall performers.

Selecting prizes

If you want to motivate everyone to actively participate in your contest, you need to select compelling rewards. Prizes such as hotel stays, concert tickets, or even a bonus are classics, but getting creative with the rewards system can be effective as well. For instance, you can offer the possibility to select their work shifts for a week, provide additional vacation days, let the winner have the CEO’s parking spot for a day, allow a late start on Monday or an early dismissal on Friday, extend lunch breaks to two hours, or provide additional days to work from home. You can also give team gifts, such as a paid lunch or an after office, or you can also make a donation to the winner’s charity of choice.

4. Mystery Prize

If you want to add a bit of a thrill to the daily routine, Mystery Prize is a perfect choice. Select an out-of-the-ordinary prize team members will not be able to guess easily. Assign a specific metric to work on, and the team members that get the best results earn clues about the prize. The more clues they earn, the easier it will become for them to guess the prize. The first person to guess it correctly, wins!

5. Battleship

A great call center contest idea to improve absenteeism is Battleships. This is an easy game to adapt to a call center environment. Divide your agents into two teams and choose a few senior members as moderators. Each team will select the location of their ships, and every day that all team members come to the office, the team has one shot to try and sink the other team’s ships.

Set a specific timeframe for the game. For this one, it might be best to play 3 games. The best out of three will be the winner.

Maintain a positive environment

Contests can get competitive, and it is important to make sure you set the right tone for any game you want to play. Not every game is right for every environment so make sure you keep an eye on the progress of the game and the impact on the overall morale. The objective is to contribute to a positive team dynamic.

Call center contests are a great way to not only improve the call center’s results, but to keep employees motivated and engaged with their day-to-day activities, of making them feel part of a team and working towards important company goals. You can help employees realize their potential as well as recognize the best qualities and find the positions where they can shine the most. Start turning these call center contest ideas into reality and reap the benefits!

Find out how to run great contests and broadcast live performance metrics automatically with Hurrah! Leaderboards!

Originally published on CRMGamified blog by CRMGamified