4 Motivational Games for Call Centres
If you manage a call centre, you know that there are busier periods of the day, week, month or year where the motivation level of your employees begins to decline and performance targets can begin to wane.
Of course, it’s not always like that – working in a contact centre can also be a rewarding career with lots of benefits.
But like most jobs, there are times when it can be more challenging than others and when you’re out the front and leading the team the motivation levels can be crucial to your success.
That’s why it’s great to have a few ideas up your sleeve that can help lift staff engagement levels and get your KPI’s back on track.
Experts suggest that motivational games for call centres need to have some key elements:
- It needs to build a fun and breezy environment for employees to relax and have fun
- They should facilitate more team bonding, getting to know and interacting with people around you
- It should be fairly linked to achievable (with a stretch!) performance targets or objectives
- It should be okay to lose!
- It needs to depict a journey you can take to develop your skills (although this is more suited for gamification)
To motivate your employees and, in turn, improve the company culture, you need to choose a game that has as many of the above key elements as possible.
Motivate your call centre agents with these 4 games
1. Call Centre Monopoly
For sure you have heard about Monopoly, that board game where you need to buy and trade your properties.
The traditional Monopoly board game just needs a few minor tweaks to turn it into a powerful motivational tool in the call centre:
- Start by changing the name of the properties and substitute them with new ones relevant to your business. If you manage a call centre that offers support in using electronic devices, you can choose Samsung, Apple or Whirlpool as properties you can buy.
- When you recreate the board it is important to keep the squares of “Go to Jail” to keep a glimpse of the traditional Monopoly.
- Give players some Monopoly money at the beginning of the game (add your company stamp or logo for extra effect or simply create your own)
- Players can move across the board by achieving their key performance indicators, for example, NPS scores, Adherence, AHT, number of upsells etc. Have a chart that acts as a dice – e.g. make 2 sales move 2 spaces or perhaps achieve target move 1 space, exceed target by 10% move 3 spaces etc.
- Players can buy and sell properties, pay rent etc.
- So the game doesn’t go on for an eternity and end up in a massive fight (OK that may just be my family experience!) make sure there is a clear endpoint – X number of properties, X amount of cash etc.
Of course, you don’t even need to have an overall winner.
One of the best things you can do is just create an opportunity where people can spend their fake money.
For example, at the end of the month, you can open a sweets shop where people could buy cupcakes and sweets with their remaining money or there are plenty of other options to reward your employees like enabling them to purchase extra lunchtime, casual clothes vouchers etc.
2. The Postcode Bingo Game
For sure you know the classic bingo game, which whilst not interactive, it is most certainly competitive!
You can adapt the traditional bingo game to a postcode bingo game for call centres.
Instead of numbers, you can use a bingo template and fill in with postcodes.
For example, 2000 is for Sydney South and 2106 for Newport Beach.
However, if you find it too complicated to replace numbers with postcodes, you can replace them with types of calls handled too.
Every time someone speaks with someone who lives in the area with that postcode or handles a specific type of call, they need to cross off the scorecard.
You can offer incentives at every full line or every full house, it is up to you.
Depending on the level of trust and competitiveness in your contact centre, you may request that the agent note down the time of the call for verification.
Another variation is to link the sending out (via email) more numbers when the team achieves certain targets.
3. Call Centre Jenga
You probably know about Jenga, the game with the tower of small pieces of wood.
You need to extract a piece at a time without destroying the tower.
The one who makes the tower fall loses.
This is a nice and simple game you can adapt to call centres to increase the motivation level of the employees.
For example, a Jenga tower has 54 pieces so you can number each piece.
You can play this game every day and it goes like this.
It is your turn if you made a sale or received good feedback, it is up to you to decide the reason but it has to be related to the call centre agent’s everyday work.
So, when your turn comes you need to pull off a piece and add it on the top layer of the tower.
If you managed to do this without knocking down the tower, then you get the points on that Jenga piece.
If you destroy the tower, several points will be deducted from your score.
And at the end of the working day, who has the most points wins a prize.
It does not have to be something big, in fact, there are lots of ways to reward staff for little to no cost.
4. Chase the Envelope
Another game that makes your employees more motivated is the “Chase the Envelope” game.
At the beginning of each day, start it with three sealed envelopes.
Each envelope contains a prize like for example a bottle of wine, a day off or a movie ticket.
Talk about the activities your team like to do the most (yes you need to talk to your team and understand what motivates them) and choose prizes that you know will keep the team vying to ‘win’ the envelope.
Then you simply set a rule for sharing the envelope – it could be every time a sale is made, a compliment is received etc
To get started, for example, every time someone gets a compliment from a client, he takes one envelope.
If there is someone else who got a compliment later that day, he claims the envelope from the employee that had it until then.
At the end of the day (or shift), whoever has an envelope can open it and the prize is his or hers to keep.
This game is fun because it keeps things interesting throughout the day and towards the end of the shift when most people are getting tired, it can inject some fun and competition into the final period of the day.
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