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Using Incentives, Prizes & Awards in Call Centres
Chapter 15 of the Call Centre Motivation Workbook
In this section we will examine incentives outside of bonuses, commissions and other elements of the remuneration package. Before we do, let's question whether incentives are worthwhile.
Are Incentives Worth It?
This is a fair question. After all, you're already paying top money for the job. So why should you bother to set aside additional budgets for incentives?
The answer lies in what industrial psychologist Mary Stanley calls "the repetitive nature of call centre work." The fact is that call centre work can sometimes be boring. Inbound telephone staff are often idle for extended periods between calls while outbound telesales agents sometimes struggle to find anyone to talk to.
For this reason we need incentives to motivate our staff in both the short and long term. In this way, we can help them achieve at least the minimum standards of quality and productivity and often stretch them to levels no-one would previously have expected.
To ensure that incentives are worthwhile, if you want to use them just to achieve the minimum required standards, budget part of your overhead on this basis.
If your goal is to use incentives to stretch performance, try to make the incentives self-liquidating from the additional projected profits generated by the call centre.
Are incentives worth it for staff? Well, they are usually taxable, so be aware that their perceived value may need to be higher than their monetary value.
Make Sure Everyone Has An Even Chance.
Be careful when you run an incentive programme to create opportunities where complete teams can win as well as individuals.
In this way, you can ensure that even the weaker members of a call centre team have the chance to participate in the glory.
Also, try to give all the teams a chance to win by making the measurables different for each incentive. For example, you can always use incentives to achieve better admin, shorter call durations, higher customer satisfaction indices or higher value telesales.
In that way you can ensure teams with different strengths have a good chance of winning. It's the same with incentives for individuals, too.
When the same teams or individuals keep winning all the prizes, it is a big turn-off for everyone else in the call centre.
Making The Incentive Motivational
To really get your agents behind an incentive programme, make their performance highly visible and lots of fun.
Blue or black ink on the departmental whiteboard is not likely to get staff fired up about incentives.
You'll find much greater buy-in if you get brightly coloured charts with lots of visuals on which to show people's progress.
Put up pictures of the prizes available, or better still, put the actual prize on display.
Email the team regularly to whip up interest and enthusiasm for the incentive.
The team will also be more motivated if there is an element of game playing in the incentive. Typical examples would be where people win points in games of Monopoly or Snakes & Ladders.
We've even witnessed one team who had to drive a model train into a station to win points. Another idea is a horse race - moving each team's horse forward one place for each win. The real point of these games is to keep the incentive fun and in the front of the teams' minds.
Short Term Incentives.
By short term incentives, we really mean anything from instant prizes to higher value rewards for performance during a month or less.
On a flat day, anything can help to raise morale and put some zip into the call centre.
Popular examples of instant prizes are:
- Children's sweets - Adults love to try extra hard to win penny chews and other low cost sweets just for the fun of it.
- Bran tub - Fill a bucket with sawdust and have winners dip for mystery prizes such as chocolate bars, small toys or left over promotional items from the marketing department.
- Marketing goodies - This is marketing's chance to get rid of all those unwanted baseball caps and XXL tee-shirts that have been hanging around in the cupboard.
- Think of the Tour de France - where the leader of the moment gets a yellow jersey.
When thinking about rewards for incentive programmes lasting weeks or up to a month, nights out at events such as bowling alleys or ice rinks are always popular (see "Building Team Spirit").
One of the most motivational short term incentives is time off.
We've often run this incentive on the basis that when a telesales agent has achieved their workload plus 10%, they can go home for the rest of their shift, or can take Saturday morning off and still get paid.
If the agent doesn't want to go home, he or she can continue at time and a half, provided they achieve a given productivity target.
In our experience this has proved to be the most popular incentive programme we have ever run. It has the benefits of getting more work completed in less time at the same cost as well as reducing variable costs.
A word of warning however, is that if too many staff are successful at the same time, you may not have enough staff cover for customer contact.
Additionally, some technology, such as predictive diallers, require a minimum number of agents on the system, so be careful not to create a situation where you close the system down.
Longer Term Incentives.
Longer term incentives means those programmes running for a month or longer.
Be aware that the dynamic nature of call centre work means that 3 months is a long time in an agent's attention span. It is preferable to run incentive programmes over as short a time as your budget allows, maintaining agent interest.
We have found some popular rewards for incentives to be:
- Money - This is always popular but is diminished by PAYE, so that a £1000.00 prize comes out at around £650.00. Try if you can to state a take home figure for staff so they are not disappointed.
- Leisure Travel - Trips to romantic or overseas locations have tremendous motivational value and are easy to arrange. You will need to cost the effect of losing the winners for the duration of the trip. And don't forget to include insurance!
- Business Trips - We have found the most long-term motivational incentive is to send winners on business trips to other call centres. This seems to increase winners' self-esteem and they can also learn from observing how things are done elsewhere. These trips do not incur income tax either.
- Tickets To Events - Sports events, concerts and "cool events" are a big turn-on and will provide a tremendous motivational boost at relatively low cost.
- Employee Of The Month Schemes - Although many people think these are corny, they work!
Costing Incentive Schemes.
Small, instant prizes are not worthy of costing, however larger value incentives provide you with an opportunity to attempt self-liquidation. When you're costing an incentive scheme, calculate the added value/profit generated by the scheme and decide how much of that you would like to pay back as a reward.
When allocating your budget, don't forget to cost lost productivity (for trips), cost of marketing materials etc.
