If you are like 75% of Americans, your household is home to a regular gamer, notes Entertainment Software Association. In my case, we had two gamers. My older sister played Mario on Nintendo 64, which shaped my experience of gaming from an early age. It also defined our relationship. Sometimes she let me be Mario instead of Luigi. Mostly, I wanted to win. Today, more than 164 million people in the US claim to play video games  and there are more than 2.5 billion active gamers around the world.

Gaming has been evident in human culture since ancient times. Humans are social beings; playing games helps people connect with each other and build a sense of community. Games also bring out our competitive spirit. And that competition can be a boon to the workplace, often improving employee engagement and performance.

Gamers Move Into the Contact Center

Gaming has evolved tremendously in tandem with advances in technology. From Pong, the first commercially successful video game released in 1972 to Nintendo Switch, it’s obvious that gaming is here to stay. And now contact centers are recognizing its value. When applied to the workplace, gaming dynamics can help drive measurable business outcomes by improving employee satisfaction. These dynamics tap into everyone’s competitive spirit, resulting in increased employee engagement.

And workforce engagement has shifted, too. New generations of employees — millennials and Generation Z — were born into the era of technology. They grew up going to arcades and playing video games online with friends, or family members, as was my case. In fact, millennials are projected to make up 75% of the workforce by 2025.

Contact centers need the right tools to keep these next-generation employees engaged. Gamification offers these employees the challenges and competition they want in a way management can measure.

Gamification and Cloud Technology

Implementing the incentivization that gaming offers into your contact center can increase workforce engagement. The first workforce gamification in call centers started in 2007 when Bunchball created the a technology platform that integrates game mechanics into non-game digital experiences. These experiences include leaderboards, rewards linked to performance, assigning points to tasks and the opportunity to advance through levels. Soon, call centers began applying game mechanics like these to KPIs as a way increase agent motivation. But the innovation that cloud enables takes it a step further. Cloud technology has paved the way for unlimited data storage, the accessibility to work from anywhere, and real-time data and automation.

The Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management solution takes advantage of what we’ve learned from gamers to improve employee engagement in contact centers. Native artificial intelligence (AI)-powered components like rewards and recognition, performance engagement, personal development, and performance dashboards give contact center employees the incentives they want to excel. Workforce engagement management also offers integration capabilities that make it easy to install as well as built-in modules to automate contests and challenges. Real-time data syncs not only improve the employee day work experience, they also give supervisors the integrated tools to track performance.

Blending AI gamification with intrinsic motivators taps into your agents’ natural desire for competition, collaboration, achievement, status and recognition.  It’s an immersive experience for agents that builds a higher level of engagement, motivation and, ultimately, productivity. All employees want to feel good about the work they’re doing; happier employees are more likely to deliver better customer experiences.

Watch the webinar “The psychology of motivating contact center employees” to learn more about how gamification can improve employee engagement and business outcomes.