The idea of making work more fun isn’t new, but companies struggle as to how exactly to implement it when many jobs are totally different from one another. However, that’s not the same with IT helpdesks where mainly a team works on taking calls, email, and live chat to resolve similar problems to keep the customers happy.
In this article, we consider whether using gamification (“game-ification”) makes sense for IT helpdesks to motivate and challenge the team to perform better.
What is gamification?
The idea with gamification is to take the priorities of the businesses, like the fastest resolution of a customer call or email, and create a leaderboard to rate team members. This leaderboard isn’t just for management – employees need to see how they’re faring against their nearest rivals too.
Other metrics for call centers like highest customer satisfaction rating for calls, emails or live chats answered, look at customer happiness over query resolution speed alone.
Does using gamification motivate the workforce?
Motivation comes in many forms. Some people are purely motivated by money. It’s a sparring motivation that doesn’t last though with the reality of lifestyle creep, which pushes up spending to match any pay rises (even truer when materialism is the true money motivator; not the greenback alone).
Employees also want to push themselves to improve and do better. When they’re at work all day, it gives them something to aim at. Especially when taking a series of phone calls during a long day where one contact seems to bleed into the next until they become unrecognizable!
Using performance metrics through gamification also prevents the issue with performance reviews where they’re too backward-looking and not considering the day-to-day performance.
Is help desk software necessary to make gamification a reality?
For the most part, yes that’s true. Managers can see what calls and other requests have come in, whom they were assigned to, and the time for resolution. The data is collected within the software package to see who is performing better within the IT support team and those that are badly lagging behind in the performance stakes.
Without using help desk solutions like the SysAid software to tabulate and calculate performance, performance tables would lag behind reality. This would be less motivating for individual team members who benefit from seeing real-time stats and movement up the performance table when they drive forward that day.
SysAid helps many companies manage their query flow, identify support bottlenecks, track each customer support request individually, and does it all in real-time. For companies determined to improve their customer ratings for IT support, the latest help desk software is a prerequisite.
It’s important that IT support managers strike a reasonable balance between response speed and quality. While it’s easy to suggest that faster responses are better, IT is complex and sometimes a longer response that satisfies the query appropriately is what’s needed. The latter is also likely to please the customer more than an inadequate, shorter reply. Therefore, the gamification needs to reflect true better performance not fun metrics for management. Then it can be highly useful to everyone.
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post, we were compensated to publish this article on our website. Learn more about our disclaimer.
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