Powering Productivity and Engagement in Call Centers With Games

Teleperformance is a global leader in Digital Integrated Business Services with a team of over 420,000 people providing services in 265+ languages, represented in 88 countries, and spanning more than 170 markets. Teleperformance aims to deliver the most advanced, digitally-powered business services to help the world’s best brands streamline their business in meaningful and efficient ways.

With such a vast global scale and local presence, Teleperformance understands that the primary blocker to consistent, effective performance is lack of motivation. Through gamification, they set out to deeply drive and motivate their employees to perform an action that leads them to better results. 

As a leader in the field, Teleperformance has been sharpening their training efforts since before the pandemic and intensified their gamification investments in 2018, starting with research on intrinsic motivation.

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As a result, Teleperformance found that an estimated 90% of their new hires worldwide are gamers and users of digital content, and as such, techniques surrounding learning by doing, learner autonomy, and interaction with others became a core goal for their training strategy.

Additionally, Teleperformance has found that regardless of generation, satisfaction and engagement with games are fairly consistent. In a recent analysis, there was a variant of only 3% between generations in satisfaction and engagement during one of their introductory gamified training courses.  

This is because dopamine is at the heart of gamification. It controls the pleasure center of the brain and affects mood, memory, and thinking processes. Psychologically, playing games activates a number of the brain’s functions responsible for igniting positive feelings and motivation, including the desire to win. Whenever a person wins a game, dopamine is released. This rush of dopamine makes him/her respond to rewards, such as points, badges, levels, progress tools, timers, and sounds, which are all gamification elements. People tend to play again and again to reconnect the brain to the reward. Amazingly, when the brain releases dopamine while learning, it is more likely to retain what was learned long-term while having a pleasurable experience.

With over 380,000 employees worldwide, Teleperformance looked into developing quick, mass-scale gamification for upskilling their workforce and growing their digital talent. Partnering with ELB Learning, they implemented The Training Arcade®, an intuitive game authoring tool with a library of ten games that can be played individually or as a team — with badges, leaderboard status, and prizes at stake!

Considering Teleperformance often delivers 2-3 week training programs, providing tools such as The Training Arcade that are easily scalable and easy to deploy, while still delivering that instant gratification and motivation to learners is key.

The Training Arcade can also track user performance and analyze data. Furthermore, an enterprise license enables a high volume of Game Creators, making this one of Teleperformance’s most successful tools. They can now create, publish, and share effective training games in minutes.

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In the first ten months of launching The Training Arcade®, Teleperformance saw more than 1.6 million game sessions played by over 273,000 employees.

Since launch, those numbers have only seen an increase:

• Over 7.2 million game sessions played
• By over 880,000 employees
• Over 33,000 games created
• By over 2,400 game creators

By upgrading The Training Arcade to an enterprise license, Teleperformance has enabled a higher volume of Game Creators to easily scale their training games to more employees, making this one of their most successful tools.

In a recent case study, Teleperformance was challenged with engaging work-from-home staff during COVID-19; to drive productivity and improve quality and accuracy in company training outcomes.

They identified employee behavior gaps by mining data across unified communications, including workforce management (WFM) and quality tools and surveys. Using The Training Arcade, they then designed games focused on productivity and knowledge improvement, awarding points, badges, and quests. They also introduced a reward system to recognize top performers. The game setup has custom features, such as the ability for team leaders to challenge agents, run competitions, and assign and publish custom quizzes.

Impact:

• Over 73% reduction in “Not Ready”
• 21% reduction in Hold Time
• 11% reduction in Average Handle Time (AHT)
• 100% increase in Critical Accuracy score in the back office
• 22% improvement in back-office Productivity

Teleperformance's TP Gamification initiatives recently won the coveted Brandon Hall Group Silver award for excellence in the Best Advance in Learning Technology Implementation category.

This entry demonstrates how in over one year, Teleperformance was able to introduce a new game-based knowledge tool that had over 800,000 games played on it, thanks to an easy-to-use infrastructure.

"Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards in 2021 provide much-needed and well-deserved recognition to organizations that went above and beyond to support their stakeholders during the unprecedented disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic," said Brandon Hall Group COO and leader of the HCM Excellence Awards Program Rachel Cooke. "The awards provide validation of best practices in all areas of HCM at a time when they have never been more important to employers, employees, and customers."

Click here to learn more about The Training Arcade.

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