By Erika Blaney, Vice President, Marketing
About 100 million people hold full-time jobs in the United States, but only 30 million of those employees say they are engaged in their work.
This is not a reassuring statistic. In fact, to anyone responsible for the bottom line, top line, or any line in between, it is terrifying.
Fortunately for Fast Company readers, a new article featuring Rajat Paharia, Bunchball founder and best-selling author of Loyalty 3.0, explains how companies can motivate the other 70 million employees to onboard faster, learn and collaborate more effectively, and contribute to a better-performing organization.
The article’s author, Lydia Dishman, does a great job detailing how big data and gamification come together to motivate specific behaviors from employees, partners and customers. The piece also includes a revealing new infographic based on an in-depth look by CITO Research into one of the toughest work environments around: the call center.
Call centers have among the highest turnovers of any profession, and each turnover costs an average of 1.5 times an agent’s annual salary. Among call center agents, enthusiasm and motivation all but disappear within six months after starting the job. The result? Nearly one in four agents (23 percent) who are disengaged with their jobs leave within a year. But when agents are engaged, that attrition rate drops to just 1 percent.
After characterizing these high stakes, the Fast Company article – and the accompanying infographic – demonstrate how companies are reversing their costly slide into disengagement by motivating employees through gamification. One spotlighted example is LiveOps, a cloud-based call center provider whose 20,000 agents all work from home. After creating a social networking hub and gamifying it with Bunchball Nitro, LiveOps cut training and hiring costs, reduced onboarding time from four weeks to 14 hours, improved service levels by 9 percent, and improved sales performance by 8 to 12 percent. This example even comes with a control group: Participating agents – those who engaged in the gamified hub – outperformed their non-participating peers by 23 percent.
If gamification can produce that kind of engagement in a call center environment, imagine what it could do for yours.
Jump to Fast Company now to read the full article.