Hyatt Employs Gamification to Make Call Center Work Engaging
Sitting in a call center taking and making calls is the kind of job that many people find repetitive and boring. But at one major American company, an entire department plays games on company time and does so with the full knowledge and consent of management. That company is the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Encouraging employees to play games, the company found, improved employee engagement in the work by setting goals, which in turn, boosted their productivity.
Hyatt turned to gamification to give employees incentives to meet company targets in the hotel’s rewards program, the loyalty program designed to keep hotel guests coming back to Hyatt. By making a certain number of calls or securing new enrollments in the program, an employee gains virtual tokens to play in games created by gamification company Snowfly. One game might involve unlocking a treasure, CIO magazine explains. Another game could be based on throwing darts. Snowfly’s developers designed the games and reward system to keep employees engaged with a task. The main key to success is to identify shorter and measurable accomplishments, Snowfly founder and CEO Brooks Mitchell told CIO.
“In sales, while the ultimate goal is the sale, there are many smaller sub-behaviors which, if accomplished and rewarded, will lead to the end goal of the sale,” he explained.
Brian Burke, an analyst at research firm Gartner, says that gamification works best when it focuses the effort on areas where employee goals are aligned with an organization’s goals. If a company or a department can find that alignment,gamification works because when an employee achieves his or her goals, the organizational goals are also achieved, Burke explains.
Hyatt now uses the Snowfly games for all of its reservation center employees, according to CIO. The company is so pleased with how the program has worked at the reservation center, that it is now experimenting with the games at some of its hotels as a part of an employee incentive program, as well.
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