In war games, the military has a blue team and a red team. Both teams are part of the same armed forces, of course. But for the purpose of the game, they are enemies. Each team works as hard as it can to win.
Why can't we have blue teams and red teams in call centers? And I don't mean QA competitions where the winner gets a free hour off the phone. Maybe divide your telemarketers into two groups, each enthusiastic for a different product. (If one team is much larger than the other, maybe you need to fix your products!) Let each team make suggestions to improve their sales script, and with management and marketing approval, actually use the revised scripts, at least on some calls. The winner is the team who can make the most sales per day, perhaps adjusted by price or other factors that keep the two products from being equal.
Or play customer service war games. Find a recurring problem and let each team come up with a solution to it. If customers claim they are annoyed by your company branding tag, let a few of the reps use a different one, and see if customer satisfaction improves. Even ideas that sound crazy could be tried on a small scale, as long as they're not illegal. Then CSRs/agents/reps can feel ownership for the policies on the floor: "They let us try it a different way, but it didn't turn out the way I thought, so I was glad to go back to the official method."
What do you think? How could competition and games improve innovation in your call center?
Great post Michael, it's interesting you bring up the idea of "war games" and internal competition as a means of motivation. This is one of the big things that political campaigns try to do in their get out the vote efforts.
When they are doing phone banking they will often "challenge" volunteers who are making the "get out to vote" calls to beat the number of calls that the previous days volunteers made or the volunteers in another office in a different part of the state/country make.
JX
Posted by: John Xavier | October 30, 2007 12:07 PM | Permalink to Comment