Points Programs

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Call Centers and Employee Incentive Programs: The Perfect Marriage (Part 2)

Last Week, I covered the first five of the top ten reasons why call centers are the perfect environment for a successful employee incentive program. This week I have the rest of the reasons along with a bonus reason!

6. Incentive program points and awards can be updated anytime, anywhere for instant recognition.

Call center employees work closely with supervisors and shift managers who support them. Because of the nature of this relationship, clients of mine will allot supervisors and managers a certain amount of points each quarter that can be distributed to workers at their discretion. All the supervisors and managers have to do is look up the employee’s account online, select a goal that has been reached and enter in the corresponding number of points earned. Tim Passios, writing forTMCNet.com, explains the importance of rapid recognition, “The faster you reward your employee, the stronger the reinforcement. Rewards that come at the end of a quarter, month, or even week are too delayed to tie the performance to the reward.”

7. Incentives can provide friendly competition.

Top performers often love to compete with others and employee incentive program websites can feature leader boards that list out the top performing individuals. Call center employees can find out how they are doing in comparison to their peers at their location and even company-wide. Since employee incentive program points can be updated immediately, workers can even check out the leader boards at the beginning and end of their shifts to find out how they are doing compared to others. A few of my clients will actually put together leader board flyers that are posted on a monthly basis throughout the workplace. The leader board flyer for each location lists out all employees at that location and points are re-set at the beginning of the quarter to allow new hires to join in on the competition.

8. Incentive programs inspire teamwork.

Incentive program goals can be designed for individuals, teams and the entire company. By targeting different levels within the organization, call center workers can be brought together for common goals. Teams can be developed from each department of a call center but members should be rotated to make sure everyone gets a chance to collaborate and compete against one another. One of my call center incentive programs has employees divided into cross-departmental teams. The members of each team have their own goals but as they achieve their department-specific metrics, their score is added to the team’s score. I think this is an excellent employee incentive idea to inspire collaboration throughout an organization.

9. Employee incentive programs can be incorporated into training, mentoring and the corporate culture.

Employee incentive programs can help to motivate employees during training, inspire seasoned workers to become mentors and help to establish and sustain a desired corporate culture. The goals of an incentive program are only limited by management’s imagination and there are many places within a call center that an incentive program can help to unlock value.

10. Call Centers have integrated CRM software that can easily report on incentive program goals.

One of the best advantages of having an incentive program for a call center is that customer relations management or CRM software platforms are almost a requirement to do business. As such, managers have easy access to employee performance statistics. When managers marry this information up with theincentive program administrative dashboard, the return on investment of the program can be determined within a few simple keystrokes. The CRM makes it simple for managers to check employee statistics at the end of a shift and add in any points earned to employee accounts. Rewarding and reporting is simple with my call center clients.

11. *Bonus* Call center incentive programs impact the workplace in many ways.

Call centers are challenged with employee engagement, attendance, retention, performance, sales/revenue and customer satisfaction issues. All of these issues can be addressed by motivating employees with brand name merchandise. The results of the call center incentive program can be measured and the bottom line is that employees, customers and owners will be happier for it.

These are my top eleven reasons why call centers and incentive programs should be married up, and why I believe more and more call center workplaces are signing up for incentive programs lately.

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