Call Center Games for Your Contact Center Associates!
Motivational Call Center Games!
Check out our Podcast episode on Games to Play in Your Call Center for even more fun to have!
GAMES TO PLAY PODCAST EPISODE! CLICK HERE
Call center/customer service work is hard. Representatives on the phone can take a ton of abuse no matter when channel they are working. The environment must be one of comfort and….yes it’s ok to say…FUN!
Our job is to make the customers that interact with our center have a world-class experience. We cannot do this if we have associates that are lethargic, have bad attitudes, and do not want to be at work. One way we can help them is by making the contact center THE fun place to work.
The contact center can be a place where you can do things that you cannot do in any other department. You can yell out loud, high five, cheer each other on! You can’t do that in accounting! Show me a quiet contact center floor and I will show you one with high turnover, low quality, and more importantly one that reflects that the associates are not enjoying themselves.
If we can get our associates to have fun at their job it takes their mind off of all the negative things that hamper great contact center work. All contact centers have associates that seem to always come in with their daily troubles on their sleeve. All contact centers have reps that leave “sick” every day because they are just plain bored. If we can take their attention off these things and channel it into something positive, then we have taken a huge step in improving our center.
It does not matter if you are running a center with insurance, banking, pure customer care, or sales vertical. You can, and in my opinion, must make the environment enjoyable.
DECOR:
Take a look at your center. Most of you are probably at work right now looking at this so take a second to look at your center… I’ll wait… lol
Does it have energy, or is it just plain and boring? If you were an associate would you like to come to work in this room every day? For that matter do you like coming into the room every day!
I’m not saying you need to overhaul your center if it’s not where it should be. There are a couple of basic things you can do. Also, I would love to get some of your ideas on this as well.
- Balloons can add a ton to a room. Just some “company” balloons or “great job” balloons go a long way. As basic as that sounds, if you give a balloon to each team’s top producer daily based on your specific KPI, it goes a long way for morale and adds to the fun look of the center.
- Team Crests/logos/mascot pics can really brighten up the room and add to great team spirit. Just having each team decide a team logo can be a lot of fun for the team members. You can even make a game out of it where each sale/great call/cross-sell gets to add a name for consideration and the top producer get to pick the name. Use your imagination.
- Posters. I really like to put up great sayings that my reps used on a call. It’s a reward for them to have a poster “named” after them and the phrase will get more uses because an actual rep used it. Having generic posters in a room is OK but tends to just get ignored a bit.
GAMES:
I have a TON of games that can be played in a call center. This hopefully will give you some ideas. These are games that can be played daily on each team. Every day each supervisor MUST have some game going on with their associates. You can do team vs. team or rep vs. rep. Please understand these are daily games to help keep our associates focused on their daily job and to have fun. These are not monthly or quarterly sales or service motivations for your overall top producer. That’s a separate topic…
- Bingo-Set up a board that includes some KPIs that can be measured during the day. Each time an associate hits one of the goals they mark it off the sheet. Once they get enough BINGO gets yelled out and you have a winner.
- Poker-Each time a rep hits a KPI they get a card. Best poker hand wins at the end of the shift or at the end of the week.
- Sit Where?-I don’t know about you but in my center, the supervisors have different chairs that the reps love. We play pass the chair. Each time a rep gets a sale or hits a KPI, they get the chair until it gets “stolen” by the next person.
- Pass The…– Like the chair, we will pass an object for each Sale or KPI hit. If it’s summer, I will go get some beach balls and we will pass or hit around a beach ball, winter, maybe a stuffed Santa. You can award the owner of the ball each hour or just once at the end of the shift.
- Off the Clock Sports-Reps love to be off the phones, its human nature. Set up some games like having a putting green on the floor, a little nerf basketball hoop, or some darts up in your center. Again however you have it set up, great sale, great monitoring score, KPI hit, the rep gets to get out of the booth and go play the game for a small prize. The real prize though is the 5 minutes off the phone!
- Hangman-Pretty self-explanatory. Supervisors set up a board and the word/phrase and the reps get rewarded with chances at guessing a letter and the word or phrase.
- Human Board Game– We set up a “board” that goes around the center. We put down “lose a turn”, “Go back to start”, “move ahead 5 spaces”…on the floor of the center. We then will move around playing pieces of the associates choosing like a board game. Use your imagination. The associates are great at setting these boards up as well!
- Battleship-Set up a board full of prizes (5-minute break, candy bar, $10 dollars) and also ships that represent each team. Every time an associate hits a metric they get to choose a space. they try to sink the other ships and also get prizes.
- Rollerball- Use your imagination here. We set up a garbage can on one end of the room and set up some cool ramps where the reps will roll a ball and try to get it in…Make a different setup every time!
- Pyramid- Every KPI hit the reps get a chance to build a pyramid with red solo cups and then take it down to earn a prize…again this is off the phone time for them. Here is a link to this in our center!
- Eye spy- Supervisor see something and every KPI a rep gets a guess…good for days when you need to engage reps.
- Sorry- We have set up giant games of Sorry that we play. Break up floor it to teams and KPIs mean rolls of the dice.
Those are all just a very small sample of games a supervisor should be playing at all times on his/her team. Remember this is in addition to a center-wide motivation that maybe runs for a week or a month. Email me for more if you are interested.
PRIZES:
What should the prizes be? Well, I can tell you they do not have to be big to have the reps fighting over them. Candy, lottery tickets, a new pencil or pen, cup, homemade cookies, a free soda are all things that work. It’s funny it really depends on how your supervisor sells it. I had a supervisor give away a 5 cent pencil eraser. Sounds boring right? But the way she sold it to her reps made it should like the greatest thing ever. They died to try to win it.
It’s very important that your middle management buys into all of this. I cannot express the need to have energetic supervision that leads the team. Take a look at some of my other posts on middle management training if you are interested.
I hope you enjoyed this look at some of the call center games we play, it brought back some great memories of some of the fun I have had on the call center floor. I hope it gets you to realize how important your role is in the overall “fun” culture of your center.
We believe in a very unique culture in the Call Center space. Take a look at our video here on our contact page to see a look inside Expivia and our culture.
For more information on us visit our home page at www.expiviausa.com!
