Hi All

I am sure that all agree that the job of a call centre rep can at times get very boring and monotonous...

Need help from all in thinking of activities that can be carried out while on calls, which will brighten up the environment we all work in

Hi Pushkar

For my first post here I thought I would share with you what we do in my call centre. I hope it helps or at least gives you some ideas!

I run an outbound operation conducting short-hit, high volume market research questionnaires. If we let the agents just do this without anything to break up their day it would be dull, dull, boring, and did I mention dull? We are fortunate enough to have this recognised and a "motivation" budget allocated.

We have daily games, weekly competitions, as well as monthly rewards. What you are able to put in your call centre will depend upon many factors. Most of our games are played while the agent is at their station and still available for calls, but some of them require getting up to play. What you decide to do would depend upon the impact that losing 30 seconds per agent per turn will have on your output (and whether the improvement in atmosphere contributes significantly enough to your production!).

Daily games:
* Bingo - we use a single bingo machine for the whole call centre, each team or cluster gets a card (printed for free off the internet) and we reward four corners or a specific shape as well as a full house - prizes are usually a fun size chocolate bar or bottle of wine for full house etc
* Jenga - we usually play this in teams, cheap to buy, easy to set up, once the agent has produced x surveys/sales they take a brick. You can put money on it (£1 per block removed EG 28 blocks removed and then it fell, the person who took the 28th brick out, gets £28) or points towards a weekly competition.
* Quizzes - we have quite a young average age and find that lyrics quizzes always go down well, admittedly the teams with the Grandads in usually win because they remember the songs first time they were out!

Weekly:
Prizes we have given away recently: New PS2 & games, Meal for 2, Ipod mini, DVD Player & Vouchers for DVD's, etc
For a weekly competition we usually put a points system in place for output and quality checks (you have a maintain x% quality in order to qualify for the prize) with bonus points for compliments from the customers, perfect quality assessments etc and the games we play. we have found that putting points on something random like the Jenga or Ker-plunk (Yes, we play ker-plunk - the large inflatable version!) encourages the agents who aren't necessarily the top prodcuers to try a little harder as they feel they are "in with a chance" of winning. This also stops the same high fliers winning all the goodies!

Monthly:
Prizes include Holidays, Widescreen TV, DVD & Surround sound systems, Digital Still & Video Cameras, a Laptop.
We also have a standard employee of the month award and a monthly meal out for all the best performers.

On a regular basis we also have theme days, small prizes themed to the day, daft outfits, and, if possible, themed games.

All of the above are not rocket science, but the adage "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps" is certainly true!! All the above do is turn an otherwise monotonous task into a fun day and most importantly of all, keeps the agent conducting the research bright, keen & not sounding like an automaton.

Best of luck!!

Claire :)

...and welcome to CCV!

Regards,
Darryl

Do you ever find that certain employee's resent what they may consider "juvenile" games? How do you deal with those employees and make they they don't "sour" the work envirnment?


bottles of wine? wow, I know we ain't in kansas anymore :). Sadly many of your idea's probably wouldn't work at some of the centres I was employeed in. Bingo wouldn't because its a form of gambling, wine would be illegal to give out.

I couldn't imagine asking our agents to pay to play jenga either.

I do like the "ker-plunk" idea and the mindset it would cause.

Bingo wouldn't because its a form of gambling

It's just a game, unless you're paying to play and winning cash prizes and then it becomes gambling. These guys aren't, so it's no problem.

wine would be illegal to give out

Is this a local problem for you? Where are you based? It's quite common in the UK to reward staff with wine / beer at given times - especially during the festive season.

I couldn't imagine asking our agents to pay to play jenga either.

I think you're missing the whole point - the business offers these things because the agent's want them - you don't have to ask them to play!

Hi Justin,

We would never force anyone to play the games, but it can be a diverting alternative to just conducting surveys all day long. If someone doesn't want to play that's up to them, their production would still include them in the prizes. I have to be honest though, we have been doing this since we opened (2+ years ago) and have had very few agents during this time who don't want to participate. In fact, I can think of only one off the top of my head, he's been with us (& still is) for approx 18 months, he doesn't object to the games but would prefer not to play them, but he has as much of a laugh when some wins the jackpot on our fruit machine, so it still affects him in a positive way.

I agree that many of these practices wouldn't work in many places, like I said in my original post, we are fortunate enough to have upper management know that the job on it's own is hard going!!

You don't have to play children's games: we find quizzes are very useful - a rogues gallery of celebrities not looking like celebrities (think about it!, Parts of famous landscapes, guessing how many steps are in the great wall of china (there are c3700). I don't think what game you ask your agents to play is important, lots of things can take away the monotony of repetative call centre activity, and anything which does this can only improve the way an agent sounds - how many times have you told your agents that their customers can hear a smile?

Claire :)

Justin,

I was thinking exactly the same thing but didnt want to say it outright which is what inspired me to ask this one...

http://www.callcentrevoice.com/topic.asp?forumid=17&threadid=5230&page=1&jump#17078

Motivational games arent always a lark for everyone, in some cases they are downright demotivating ie. implying you lack team committment by abstaining.
Those with a mature outlook (possibly older staff)and pragmatists find them pointless.

Those whose religion precludes them or are teatotallers by choice object to 'nights out down the pub'. Same for alcoholic prizes.
As for quizzes they can work fine if they are aimed correctly at the audience tasking into account all diversity issues.

Creating and perpetuating a young culture might prove problematic under Age Discrimination legislation. Interesting to see what test cases it throws up.

DB, I assure you that your view of what you can do at work is very "european".

I am located in Canada currently and have travelled throughout north america (and europe). At one point we had a "free" vlt machine, you couldn't win. Just pull the lever and see if it says "win" or "lose".

unfortunatly we had a chronic recovering gambler who accused us of supplying him with this that caused him to "fall off the wagon".
Our 50/50 draw also came under scrutiny from the lottery commision more than once as it often reached hundreds of dollars.

As already mentioned, no way anyone could give away alcohol as a prize, how would you deal with any workers you had under 21 or 18? (whatever the legal age is over there). Are they not eligible to win prizes even though they work just as hard?

I think we have to be alot more careful of favoritism over here. The jenga thing may work but only people with money get to play it? Does that mean if I have alot of money I can get off the phone and play while my "poor" co-workers have to pick up my slack?

Sad I know...but this is the way it works :(

I have had a few interesting incentives...I will have to post them later today.

Justin,

Just to clarify:
"I think we have to be alot more careful of favoritism over here. The jenga thing may work but only people with money get to play it? Does that mean if I have alot of money I can get off the phone and play while my "poor" co-workers have to pick up my slack?"

They don't pay us £1 for a go - we (being the company motivation budget)add £1 to the "prize pot" for each brick removed, and it's depentant upon production - surely rewarding those that produce for you is what many companies do already in terms of commission, bonuses etc??

Thought I'd better clear it up!!

-Claire :)

DB, I assure you that your view of what you can do at work is very "european".

You know that's quite uncanny, because I actually do live in Europe. But for the record, I'm not so keen on being called European though; just like you probably don't like being called an American. ;-)

It's 18 over here for alcohol. Alternate prizes can always be offered for under-age workers. As it is, the last two centre's I saw offering wine as prizes didn't have anyone below this age - but I appreciate it will be a problem somewhere.

unfortunatly we had a chronic recovering gambler who accused us of supplying him with this that caused him to "fall off the wagon

Sounds to me like you couldn't have won with that guy. If you'd paid him cash he probably would've complained that you were encouraging him to flip for heads or tails.

I still think you've missed the point though: No money is required to play these incentives. Generally, they're performance based so that the harder you work the more chance you have of winning a prize. As Claire has said, you often need to modify the rules slightly to bias it against the really good agents or they'll just win all the time. This always seems rather unfair, but at the end of the day their real skills will be renumerated with a salary that reflects this, and the games are there to make the day more enjoyable.

With staff turnover a concern for many call centre managers, it's nice to see someone that's trying to prevent it - rather than just cope with it.

Claire, I agree that it is fabulous that this works at your centre. I am just a very big fan of "CYA" and have to say I have seen things like games really poison a work place.

You mentioned you have one person who does not want to compete in what she may consider "childish games". Now the problem starts to happen if this person is bitter, say for example they are your top performer. Should they not be eligible for prizes simply because they don't want to compete?

These are probably problems that large centres 1000+ have to deal with much more than a smaller centre. (though I am not sure how large the one you are referencing is)

I realize I am coming of sounding negative, I would like to assure everyone that I think all of Claire's ideas would be great but I am a devils advocate of sort.

Hello,

Thought I would post some of the "incentives" that we have tried in the past, some with great success, some with limited success. I often found one of the hardest things was making sure everyone enjoyed the incentives and had an equal opportunity to partake in them.

First thing I am going to talk about is some of our "failures".

Failure #1. mini golf with those little plastic hollow balls (like ping pong balls).

We thought this would be a great idea, We would give our people 10 minutes offline, they could hit the ball, whomever was closest would win. Sadly one of our agents nailed the ball extremely hard and was aiming at his Team Leader, now the Team leader was a nice guy and thought it was all in good fun. Sadly it missed our team leader and nailed our 108 pound senior operations manager in the knee.

It dropped her like a proverbial sack of potatoes. We had to drive her to the hospital, lost probably 5 hours of agent productivity. She missed work for like 2 days.

I realize it was a tiny ping pong ball..I got no idea how it took her out...but it did...

Failure #2 Foam football game

We thought this was ok, a small light foam football our people could toss around while on calls. it worked well for a few days but then we had two distinct events occur that caused us to stop that.

incident a: unsuspecting agent gets foam football in back of head. Swears...customer hears....customer escalates issue and poor agent nearly loses his job :(

incident b: The stupid foam football hits the sprinkler system which gets triggered. $100,000 in damage is caused instantly, significantly more losed in productivity, etc

Failure #3: Punching bag ala inflatable clown

We thought one of those punching bags that would bounce back up if you hit it was a good idea. We even had giant "safety gloves" for you to wear while smacking it around. Unfortunately some of our agents got freaked out by how agressive other agents were. One of the Team leaders also got nailed.

We also had trouble with schedle adherance everytime we tried to implement a videogame system in the building. All the "friends" would always leave at the same time. We even had to remove our TVs because everyone would log out between 7pm-730pm when the Simpsons were on. :o

Some ideas that we would use and may work:

Recently I was able to work for a particular client that had significant monetary resouces. We gave away things like cars, vacations to disney land, etc, etc.

These contests were normally awarded for things like sales. ie: one sale = one entry in the contest. At end of month we would draw and someone would win. Those were centre wide initiatives and personally I never found them all that appealing and I don't think the agents did. The people who were bad at sales just gave up because they knew they couldn't compete with the "super stars", the "super stars" also started to push the boundarys of legitimacy.

We often found that incidents of fraud would increase when we offered an amazing prize. :(

I found the prizes and competitions I could run within my team to be much more exciting.

Poker (I realize the irony) is very popular over here. I found it great giving a card for every sale an agent got. Whomever had the best hand then would win.

One really funny thing that I didn't think would work well was perhaps the most succesfully I have ever seen...it was for pounds of bacon....

I KID YOU NOT.

For every person on my team who hit the goal I set for them they would receive a pound of bacon. It was hilarious how happy people would get over such a silly price. I had one person the next day who would always bring in bacon sandwiches and brag to the rest of the team. This really increased motivation.

You got to look at your group of people and tailer the incentives to what will work for them.

Also in Canada we have some extreme privacy acts. We can not single out people based on being top performers or low performers. ie: We can not print a list saying "this person is the best and this person is the lowest on our team"

Now the opposite applies here in the UK, in the 12 years I've been involved in call centres I've never once encountered physical activities/ games being played on the call centre floor. This may be due to space but I suspect there is an entrenched and unspoken worry about Health and Safety - the seem to be frowned upon or just not considered. The H&S at work act is quite strict and rigourously enforced. I guess we are historically retiscent and too polite (ha,ha).

Clare, dont forget the 'custard pie the supervisor' game as well. While it was part of a charity day it was one of the things that REALLY motivated our agents ;o). As well as the usual games for the agents we used to have races on the call floor as well, but having someone bombing round the place on a scooter, a spacehopper or doing a wheelbarrow race did get a little risky after a while.

One thing we have found that does work really well is running a tombola for people who have booked a certain amount depending on the data set they are using. The prize being a day/week off fully paid.

Also the 'Moolah' (I think that's how it's spelt) money auction. Over a period of say a month depending on what you get for the auction reward each sale with a certain amount of 'moolah' which can be used to bid for the prizes in the auction. If you have some of the prizes on display as well you can also play on the competitive nature of your agents as the more they want something on display the more they tend to work the data to get as much moola as possible.

The easiest way to balance any competition like that is to handicap the top agents. We've had it in the past so that for every deal a lower end agent gets our top ones would have to get 5 or 6.

In the centres I worked in those "super star" agents would riot if we tried to do that. Not to mention it would really make our "lower performing" agents to feel like crap knowing we had to handicap other players to give them a chance of winning.

It probably works for us as our agents are put into datasets depending on their ability. So the handicap is set dependant.

I think it must be part of the British attitude...

Far from "feeling like crap" that we are handicapping other agents (who are already well rewarded in their pay packets for their achievements so don't feel they are missing out!) they would probably riot if we didn't, this is mainly due to the nature of the data sets. Obviously it makes sense to put your highest skill set into the best data you have available to maximise production and all agents know this (it can be a motivating factor in itself - if I produce x I get a chance of using the better data and improving my income... and yes, I'm aware this may also be a can of worms, these teams ARE reviewed on a regualr basis!!) if they think that these "super stars" are going to walk all the competitions when they are working just as hard, they would be completely demotivated and would complain we were being unfair and unrealistic.

At the end of the day the key word for all these activities is FUN and it appears we are fortunate that it works so well.

Claire

Are motivational posters a help or simply patronising?

You know the ones. "Smile while you dial". "Individually we are great. Together we are excellent." "Close-close-close." etc.

If staff need constant reminders are they an indication that your training isnt working or perhaps the phrases are meaningless?

I've posted it before and I'll post it again!

http://www.despair.com/

Check out the calendar posters