4 Secret Tips For Gamifying Call Center Onboarding

4 Secret Tips For Gamifying Call Center Onboarding
Summary: Remember your first few days on the job? Terrifying to say the least. Onboarding makes the transition into work simpler and ensures employees have the basic skills they need. This article gives readers 4 tips for new employee onboarding, using call center employee onboarding as an example.

Secret Tips For Gamifying Call Center Onboarding

Remember your first few days on the job? Terrifying to say the least. Yet, somehow we shelve those memories and when it comes to hiring customer call center employees, we are so focused on finding the right people that we forget the importance of onboarding. By spending that energy on applying correct onboarding, we can help recruits through those first few days, keep them happier, more engaged, more productive, and with fewer plans to quit.

Why onboard?

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. 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.

Successful onboarding familiarizes employees with the essence of their job, namely customer satisfaction, and the tasks required to achieve that – their job function. It quickly gives them a sense of accomplishment and success. In fact, some companies are such exponents of onboarding that they engage with potential recruits via pre-boarding programs. Onboarding is an excellent foundation for enterprise gamification since gamification and learning work well together.

Gamification: The secret ingredient

While the word “gamification” brings to mind playing mobile video games, that’s not it. It’s the art of  applying game mechanics to  enterprise applications to successfully communicate with employees, encourage behavior changes, and boost performance. It is certainly more than using simple leaderboards, badges and points.

You can use gamification for eLearning and onboarding, but be sure to remove the temptation to cheat and the discouragement of failing. 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 elearning tasks.

4 Top Tips and Tricks For Gamifying Call Center Onboarding:

  1. Leveling Up
    Game onboarding is more prevalent that most of us realize. Played Candy Crush Saga or Temple Run? You start at a beginner’s level and soon find yourself driven to win as if by some otherworldly force. Well, that’s the secret behind these games’ success — they tap into our innate, habit-forming desire to win fast and to do everything possible to experience the cues that signify that we’ve completed a level and to reap the satisfaction of independently mastering a skill. Now, if we can create a similarly easy and rewarding ‘beginner’s level’ during employee onboarding and training, those first few days on the job would be less terrifying. Additionally, the process would be more successful for the long-term. The habit-forming thrill of quick wins is also key to job performance as it teaches one skill at a time affording players the sense of mastery and autonomy, thereby achieving employee engagement and satisfaction.
  2. E-learning experience
    Remember the days when you arrived at a new job and were presented by HR with a huge, fearful manuscript that constituted your training and had to be learned by rote? It did nothing to calm the nerves. What if you’d received training via quizzes, rewards for reviewing materials, and team work to show you how to apply theory in practice? That’s gamification and it has an amazing learning ROI no matter what the subject matter. By accentuating the completion of small tasks, employees learn more and faster than they do reading said manuscripts, watching videos or endless presentations.
  3. Work the team angle
    Creating team-based competitions around learning training material and completing tasks, is another super effective way to optimize onboarding through gamification. Furthermore, encouraging teamwork between new employees sharing a similar taxing experience can even achieve 100% course material completion.
  4. Onboarding… and beyond
    Call center onboarding shouldn’t just come to a sudden stop after the first few days. We find that key to success is to place newbies in less complex and demanding customer service channels, such as responding to clients via email or social networks where there are no immediate responses to deal with. This gives them the time they need to gain knowledge and experience before say answering calls or dealing with technical problems. To help then gain that knowledge, integrate and succeed, continue to incorporate learning and gamification during their regular workday — be it through team contests, solving challenges, or training as a qualification.

Remember, gamified onboarding done properly from the get-go offers  an opportunity to provide employees with the knowledge and skills they need to excel and to make a lasting good impression that handing over a dreaded training document will never achieve.