Incentive Competition

Have you considered talking to the agents to see what sort of incentive scheme they might like?

You have decided on the reward, but there are two other, possibly more important factors to consider.

1. What you want them to do.
2. How you want them to do it.

If you run a simple goal of "get the highest x" then there will be issues with how part time staff factor in to this. There is also the common issue that the agents ability in different areas varies. Depending what you pick might favour the strengths of certain agents. Especially in a small team this may result in some thinking "Why bother?"

An incentive should be a close competition if possible, so careful thought as to how you can use the agents preferences, along with what will achieve your desired outcome, in a way where everyone has a chance of winning. If after week 3 someone is in last place, they will probably become disinterested in the incentive. Try writing down everything that you want the incentive/competition to include ie.

"All agents have a fair chance"
"The winner won't be obvious till the end"
"I want to target performance / improvement in performance"

Once you have your list (which might be 10 of more points) you can make sure the incentive scheme does all of this.

I personally favour incentives where all agents win something, but they are simply vying for a larger % of the total.

If you want to post up a few details as to what you had in mind, and perhaps how you team respond then we can make a couple of other suggestions or give some more detailed feedback.

Do you monitor the agents calls or emails? if so that may be a valid metric as the quality of an agents call or email shouldn't really be affected by the number of hours they actually work, where-as other metrics like call handle time may be depending on call volume for the hours they work and so on.

How agents handle calls or emails is key to customer satisfaction and even meeting targets if you incorporate call control in your monitoring assessment?

What made you opt for flights? is this something that would appeal to the majority of the team? and will they be able to get time of to take advatnage of the voucher?

Recently here we have offered vouchers as prizes that can be used at a large number of retailers but also things like Ipod nano's - because I work for a very large organisation it is possible for an admin team to negotiate significant discounts for actual products with a variety of retailers - this option may not be open to you?

The best incentive I've seen here (and won) was a Day out for me and my team - it took place on a Saturday so we ensured none of us were scheduled to work that day. We went white warter rafting - had an amazing meal out with lots of alcohol flowing - all chaufer driven it was brilliant.

You seem to have a decent budget so maybe something like that would work for your team?

I think that the way to address the fairness issue is to have a draw. Extending the ideas above an example would be that every success gets a ticket. The logic is that the people working longer can get more tickets but it doesn't penalise the superstar part-timer who can get the job done in half the time! This approach also minimise the admin. As far as winners are concerned - I would have thought that a chart showing how many tickets each person had would work, with possibly a smaller additional prize for points winner (or even do this at team level so part-timers are included)

Just to be contentious - not all incentives have to be "fair" other than being achievable. You need to think about what you want to achieve from running an incentive. The most important thing is that it achieves the objectives. If it doesn't - you don't want anyone to win.