As a manager of the customer support department or call center, you face one of the biggest challenges out there. To keep your team motivated despite the heavy volume, disgruntled customers, and extreme pressure to deliver good customer service. Also, while it’s always important for your team members to know what’s required of them, it’s even more important that they have the desire to supply it. One way to accomplish this is to add a little gamification into the mix.

Gamification in the workplace encourages healthy competition by offering incentives and rewards to increase interest and commitment to the goals you choose. Contests are a way to implement gamification in your call center. With just a few creative contest ideas, you can give direct reasons to your support team members to do their best.

Here are 9 such creative contest ideas that you can implement in your call center.

1. Daily Perks

Daily Perks is one of the simplest of all the customer support contest ideas. Choose one of the key performance indicators you want to improve in this contest. Then, at the end of the day, give a special prize for the person who performed best on that metric.

The KPI you choose needs to be one you can measure quickly so the winners can claim their reward at the end of their shift or as soon as they come in the next day. For example, here are some KPIs you could choose for the contest:

• Maximum number of calls attended per day

• Quickest response time for the day

• Or the Highest number of positive responses that an agent has scored in a day

The daily perks can include anything from a gourmet coffee drink, lottery tickets, a gift card, funny socks, or an extra break.

2. Contact Center Bingo

In this spin on a classic game, each customer support employee receives a bingo card, and as agents make calls they get to mark off spaces on the card for things like, “obtained a lead,” “spoke with five people with the last name beginning with the letter ‘V’,” and so on. The image above gives a template of the call center bingo card that you can directly download and use or modify it to suit your requirements. This game keeps the teams on track towards achieving their daily goals while simultaneously rewarding them with small prizes along the way.

3. Penny for a cause

One great way to increase cooperation among your agents is to get them working together to donate to a charity.

Choose teams for this game. Give each team a jar with 1 penny in it. Then, keep adding a penny to the jar each time a team member achieves a specific outcome– like getting a positive response from a customer. Tell them that the team that will have the most money by the end of the game wins the competition. All of this money in the jar will go to charity. The winning team gets to choose a team prize of their choice like going for a team outing, team dinner or getting a shift of their choice.

This will motivate your team to strive for a good cause as well as to win the prize.

4. Call Center Olympics

If your team is lagging and you want to really boost all your metrics, go for the gold! Try comprehensive call center contest ideas like Call Center Olympics. Choose several metrics to compete in and set the time period for the games. Each KPI is considered a sport. The person who has the best KPI score for that sport gets a medal for the win– Gold, Silver or Bronze.

To wrap up your Call Center Olympics, you can have a party to celebrate the winner’s success. Don’t forget to have an awards ceremony to honor the top three winners!

5. Call Center Trivia

This inspires your team to work together. The call center trivia can be about small, little-known facts about your team’s work. Or, it can be purely trivial, coming from the general culture.

The trivia question is announced at the beginning of each shift. Here, you could ask trivia questions like

• What conditions should be met for issuing a refund to a customer?

• What transportation mode do we use to deliver goods in California?

• How long are track and confirm records kept for delivery confirmation?

Then, after the call center stats are tallied for the day, the agent with the top metrics gets to guess. If they don’t guess right, the person with the second-best metrics gets a chance.

The first person to guess correctly gets their choice of several call center incentives. If no one guesses, the first person to bring in the answer the next day gets the prize.

6. Mystery Prize

Put a little intrigue into your workplace with the Mystery Prize call center contest. Choose an unusual mystery prize that your team members won’t be able to guess easily. Then, hide the prize or a picture of the prize somewhere in your call center.

Each day, select 5 agents who perform best on the metric you specify and give them clues. These clues can be about what the mystery prize is or where it’s located. The more clues they get, the closer they get to finding the prize. The first person to identify it wins it!

This game motivates your agents to strive to become the top 5 best-performing agents each day. It also makes your employees come to work every day with an enthusiasm to take the prize at the end of the day.

7. Raffle

If you think your employees will only be motivated by a big prize, consider developing a raffle system for employee performance. Employees who reach a certain benchmark of success (a certain number of ‘highly satisfied’ customers or a specific amount of accumulated points) will be entered into a raffle for a large, buzzworthy reward item.

Ideas could include a weekend hotel stay, concert tickets, or a sizable cash prize. The frequency of these raffle drawings could depend on your budget and/or the schedule of your data retrieval. Either way, non-winning employees’ names could remain in the drawing for next time. This way you incentivize employees to keep working hard to increase their odds more and more for each cycle.

8. Survivor

Use the self-contained environment of the call center to recreate a game of Survivor. This will be one of the most fun call center contest ideas you’ve ever tried!

Split your agents up into teams. Each day, decide on a challenge, such as positive feedback, high-quality scores, or fast handling times.

Then, write a message telling what the day’s challenge is. The teams meet at the beginning of each shift to plan their strategy for the upcoming challenge.

At the end of the shift, the team that comes in first gets a reward or point towards the final prize. The losing teams must eliminate a team member. Those eliminated are placed together to make a new team for the next day’s challenge.

This call center version of Survivor keeps everyone involved and working with different agents that they might not ordinarily interact with. This helps them to create a good bond with their colleagues and improves your workplace culture.

At the end of the contest, the team with the most points gets call center incentives.

9. Wheel of Appreciation

Compliment calls are usually few and far between. Most customers don’t have a lot of time to call and compliment someone who has given them good service. So, when one of those calls comes in, it’s a rare occurrence that should be rewarded with something significant.

Set up a Wheel of Appreciation in the office. Divide the wheel into wedges, and write the name of a great prize on each wedge. When someone gets a compliment call, they get to spin the wheel to get a prize for it.

Have the Wheel of Appreciation at all times in the call center as it reminds your agents of the customer satisfaction they’re aiming for in their work. It might sit there for weeks before someone gets a chance to spin it but that’s okay. You can keep the happy anticipation going by giving it a spin when you walk by or adding valuable prizes on the wheel.

When that compliment call comes in, make a big production of it. Call the winning agent to the wheel and point them to the spinner. Then, bring out the prize that they win from your store of call center incentives and give it to them on the spot!

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