8 Simple Tips for Designing Call Centre Incentive Programmes

Dick Bourke of Scorebuddy shares his advice for creating an incentives programme that will improve motivation in the contact centre.

Working as a call centre agent can seem like a tedious, thankless job. In some cases, agents spend hours talking with people who don’t want to be on the phone any more than the agents themselves do.

Even in the best circumstances — where customers are calling to purchase high-demand products — not only can each day look the same… each hour can as well.

So it’s not surprising that some call centre agents take an “eight and skate” approach to their shifts. It’s equally unsurprising that some call centres are satisfied to settle for employees who coast through the days as long as they’re not directly alienating customers.

Is a Contact Centre Incentive Programme Necessary?

Nearshore Americas, a major call centre company with 7,000 employees, improved employee retention and attribute their success to a survey they implemented to identify all areas that a call centre incentive programme would improve.

Almost immediately after starting the call centre incentive programme, absenteeism and employee churn dropped significantly.

But I Don’t Have the Budget for an Incentive Programme

“I don’t have the budget for an incentive or rewards programme” is a legitimate reason to not have a full incentive programme with big monetary rewards. But that is no reason not to recognize the top-performing call centre agents!

If the contact centre budget is a constraint, you should still try to find creative and imaginative ways to make sure that excellent work is noticed and rewarded appropriately. Some of the most effective CS incentive programmes don’t need big investments; there’s no “right way” to choose or hand out rewards.

The most important thing is to find CS incentives that fit your call centre and give the most value to your employees, and by extension, your customers.

Employees who are incentivized in the right ways work harder, are happier at work, and are more likely to stay at their current employment longer.

Some companies might think that ‘good enough’ is an acceptable attitude from a call centre agent. But that’s a mistake. We’ve known for a while that there’s a correlation between employee engagement, performance and profit — that sweet spot where the employee wants to be there and is invested in the outcomes they produce — it’s been well documented that there’s a causative relationship.

According to Martin Hill-Wilson, a blogger and thought leader with a long-standing track record in customer engagement strategy and implementation for call centres, “for every 10% increase in employee engagement levels, a company’s customer service levels go up by 5%, and profits by 2%.”

Recognizing the connection between employee engagement and the bottom line, however, is the easy part. The challenge lies in figuring out how to increase employee engagement. And, as we outlined above, that can be especially difficult when it comes to call centre agents.

How to Create a Call Centre Incentive Programme in 8 Steps

But difficult is far from impossible. It’s a matter of identifying the behaviours that impact the bottom line and then finding the right way to implement a call centre incentive programme.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Choose Your Measurement Criteria Carefully

This is the most important step in any incentive programme. Successful call centre incentive programmes focus on things that improve company performance — and steer clear of things that undermine it.

Focusing on time spent per call, for example, encourages employees to complete calls quickly rather than ensuring that the caller’s needs have been met. Focusing on first-call resolution discourages agents from asking for help when they need it.

The key to getting it right is to first decide what you want employees to do and, only then, think about how to motivate them to do it.

2. Be Able to Clearly Explain the Link Between Your Metrics and Company Goals

People tend to rebel against rules that seem to exist just for the sake of having a rule. And they have no tolerance whatsoever for rules that dictate the opposite of what they’re supposed to do.

As illustrated by the framework of the P&Q challenge, an important element in increasing employee engagement is being able to clearly explain why the things you ask them to do matter.

If you measure and/or incentivize employees on calls per hour, be able to explain why that’s important and how it impacts the bottom line. And, if you find yourself having to really stretch to find a link, that’s a red flag.

If you know the explanation is flimsy, your agents will too. They’ll also think you assume they aren’t smart enough to figure it out.

3. Do Not Set Your Call Centre Agents up for Failure

When you give agents a goal, make sure they have the ability to achieve it. It’s not fair to incentivize agents on first-call resolution, for example, if you have outdated technology that frequently drops calls.

4. Do Not Base Incentives on Things That Are out of Your Employees’ Control

Customer compliments make great stories — but a lousy basis for incentives. That’s because, no matter how outstanding an agent’s performance is, it’s still up to the customer to call or write with a compliment.

Relying solely on customer compliments can easily wind up with a mediocre agent who served a customer with extra time on their hands being rewarded over an agent who provided exceptional service to someone who’s in the middle of a crisis and has no time to call with a compliment.

5. Focus on Behaviours You Want to Encourage

Sometimes an agent will bend over backwards to make a customer happy — but they do it by circumventing the rules.

Since actions that are rewarded will likely be repeated, you can end up encouraging behaviour you don’t want based on one exceptional outcome. If you don’t want everybody to do it, don’t reward it.

6. Ensure Rewards Aren’t Patronizing

Rewards that cause employees to roll their eyes and snicker are the kiss of death for a call centre incentive programme.

If your employees truly love gold stars and smiley-face stickers, then go shopping for stickers.

But don’t just adopt a particular reward system because you read about it in a blog somewhere. Rewards that employees see as patronizing are worse than no rewards at all.

7. Match the Reward to the Person

A gift certificate to a fancy restaurant might be a great reward, but an employee with three toddlers at home and a spouse who works an opposite shift will probably never be able to use it.

Tickets to a football game won’t mean much to an employee who has no interest in sports. And employees who cringe in the face of public attention won’t enjoy being praised in front of the whole team.

Choose incentives that will have value for the person being rewarded rather than incentives that would have value for you.

8. Analysing the Process

Last but not least are the call centre incentive programme metrics. The key to any new programme is to track the changes after implementation.

Analysing the right metrics is key to successfully knowing if your call centre incentive programme is working.

Also, while those metrics may be similar across companies on the macro level, individual managers need to amend those metrics on the micro level to ensure accurate reporting for their call centre.

Design Doesn’t Need to Be Difficult

The biggest misconception about call centre incentive programmes is that they are difficult to design. They’re not — in fact, they’re deceptively simple.

Dick Bourke

It all comes down to identifying employee behaviours that support your objectives, incentivizing employees to do those things while discouraging behaviours you don’t want, and doing it all in a way that is meaningful to the employees in question.

What could be simpler than that?