Question: I need competition ideas to help boost agent morale. Any suggestions?
I am a Team Lead for an inbound call center. There are 2 of us and we are looking to divide our agents into two groups. Each group would consist of 25 agents.We are looking to boost morale but get the agents involved. The idea is to get some competition going. The end results is to improve average handling time, boost conversions and so on. We are the same as all other call centers that struggle in these areas as well as absenteeism.
Do you have any suggestions on games that we can use to compete our two groups that could be fun for the agents and improve stats?
First thing is you have to have metrics that all your agents accept – then you measure one team against the other – beware though there are pitfalls in this approach, particuarly around knowledge sharing.
If you do go ahead, you really need to pick your metric carefully as obviously if the teams reguarly work different hours ie. one a day and one a night shift, they will by default receive different kinds of, and also volumes of calls.
From the description of your operation you’ve provided, you may find your best comparison metric to be conversions as a percentage of calls received.
Comment by Doug Watson — 2 Apr 2009 @ 11:49 am
DEFINITION OF FREE MORALE AGENT
Comment by P GERSTENBERG — 12 Apr 2009 @ 5:17 pm
for attendance: I’ve had a great competition of ‘battleships’ against two teams. Each team plots their ships, TMs or senior staff moderate, each 100% attendance day qualifies for an attempt on the other teams board. Play it over 3 months, with the winning team been best out of the three.
Do lots of games like this, adapting popular board games. I’ve done Monopoly (great for within the team), scrabble etc. So many games can be adapted for Call Centre use, adjusting to make them the theme of your business/targets etc.
Comment by Chris Roberts — 21 Apr 2009 @ 2:50 am
1) Assign tasks to individuals within your team
2) Have some extra curricular activities
3) Close interaction with team members, assigning goals and weekly targets for improvement
4) Weekly sessions and discussion how to improve KPI achievement performance
5) Have competition among your team members
Comment by Nauman Cheema — 25 Apr 2009 @ 10:03 am
I have just run a competition for my team last month. We moved from 5th position the previous month to 1st. All I did was purchase a bag of plastic balls from Asda/Wallmart. (You will need more for two teams). The competition ran daily where there was a focus on our key target areas (weighted by how many balls they were able to collect out of the ball pit (which was a flip top waste bin… again from Asda. Each ball was marked with indelible ink with a value. When ever they achieved a conversion/sale they could ‘blindly’ collect a ball/balls depending on the weighting. Each member of staff would build their own ball collection. The person with the highest total score won themselves a FREE break scheduled into their rota the following day.In addition I would throw in Bargain Bonus balls which would have a surprise value (ie tea & Biscuits served by manager.
You could extend this to involve the total amount of points per team. … with the opposing team serving tea/coffee for their opponents the following day.
Regarding handling time… you could have a ‘penalty’ deduction clause that they lose an amount of points if they exceed your Handling time target.
Comment by Carol — 20 May 2009 @ 11:29 pm
Best way to assess your morale level to create a baseline is quite simple.
Organise a team meeting ( pref 15 – 17 agents ) draw a simple line starting with 0 – 10 ( ten being high morale).
Give each agent a sticky note (no names). – leave the room while this is done – approx 2 min.
Re enter the room. I
If the majority is high – ask the staff why is the morale high, what do we do as a team that is great ?
If it’s in the middle then ask the team how can we improve it to 10 and the same if the result is low.
List down all their concerns. (at this stage do not solve the problems just write them down)
After every team has been completed the exercise get the leadership team to break down their concerns and ideas into:
Short Term Fixes – Completed within 7 days
Medium Term Fixes – completed within 45 days
Long Term Fixes – Completed 12 – 18 months
( remember to share your successes)
The idea is to solve the short term fast and get back to your staff. This will give your agents the confidence to express their ideas as these concerns are quickly dealt with. You’ll be suprised the positive feedback you receive from your teams )
Medium and long term fixes – update your staff on a weekly or fortnightly or even monthly .
Some of the simple things create high attrition / UPA’s. It’s not all about the money.
I regularly conduct these sessions with my staff on a quarterly basis and I know what morale level is on a regular basis.
Also i find that when we do conduct staff surveys there are no suprises.
My attrition has been 3 agents YTD with the total FTE of 92. My UPA (unplanned absences are under 2.1%) - whien first stepping into the role the figures were attrition of 7 per month and UPA of 29%
Comment by PDinys — 11 Jun 2009 @ 5:51 am
Hi! We are a company specialising in motivational games created for call centre managers to help them overcome the problems that are mentioned in this site. Our games are carefully created to increase team moral, motivation, and help them attain and sustain targets. We also have found the our games have helped reduce absenteeism significantly. If managers are a bit bashful, we will come in and run the game(s) for you.
As mentioned earlier our games have been tried and tested by a National Utility call centre and we can supply stats to back this up.
Comment by Anne Inch — 15 Sep 2009 @ 11:50 am