Gamification could help improve helpdesk results, customer satisfaction, and department morale ... if you do it right.
Key Takeaways:
- What is gamification and why is it effective for boosting MSP performance?
- The connection between gamification, metrics, and performance of your help desk team
- Key MSP help desk metrics to track
Your MSP’s help desk is often the first point of direct contact between a customer and your business. You can bet that whatever happens there has a direct reflection on the overall image of the company and ultimately your bottom line. So, how do you control the narrative and ensure help desk operators are productive and efficient at their jobs?
Gamification, that’s how. By gamifying your help desk activities, you can motivate your employees, keep them engaged, and boost customer satisfaction at the same time. In this article, we’ll look at how you can successfully achieve this.
What is gamification and why is it effective for boosting performance?
Gamification is the weaving of gaming techniques into non-gaming activities to improve engagement and fun. At the office, this would involve the incorporation of gaming techniques into workplace tasks like training, documentation, or taking calls and engaging with customers at the help desk.
Studies have shown that gamification is effective for both boosting engagement and improving customer satisfaction. According to one survey, 89% of employees say gamification makes them feel more productive and 88% say they are happier at work because of it.
Gamification takes advantage of techniques like problem-solving, storytelling, competition, and rewards to keep workers incentivized and engaged. Workers are also more likely to retain what they learn in gamified experiences.
It encourages teamwork and collaboration among employees by asking work together to solve problems and reach team goals. At the same time, it builds self-reliance by motivating workers to learn at their own pace.
Given the facts, it’s not hard to see why gamification leads to better customer satisfaction overall: Happy employees serve better, customers notice this, and the business thrives because of that.
The connection between gamification, metrics, and performance at the help desk
Gamification does not work without two things:
- 1. Metrics: These are the goals, often called “key performance indicators” (KPIs), that must be met in order to deliver a great customer experience. These vary from department to department and business to business. What is essential in the marketing department does not necessarily apply to the help desk.
- 2. Documentation: Documentation helps with onboarding, retention, and making sure everybody is on the same page and understands what’s expected of them. When a strong documentation culture is in place, metrics and behavior can be effectively recorded — automated even, with the right software solution — which allows them to be gamified. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and you can’t reward it either, so documentation is essential to gamification.
The ultimate aim of gamification is to boost employee performance and customer satisfaction by improving engagement and motivation. KPIs are meant to guide the way and help you and your employees gauge progress. They add visibility and tangibility to employee productivity, team productivity, and other areas essential for the growth of the business.
By gamifying activities, you establish a framework where hitting these goals becomes a fun, competitive exercise where employees are engaged and can measure their own progress in order to stay motivated. They can compare their performance with their peers, in relation to the KPIs, and during contests as they gather points to reach goals and rewards.
When gamifying your help desk, here are a few key performance indicators you want to pay attention to:
3 key help desk metrics to track
The key metrics you need to measure for your help desk can be divided into three categories:
- 1. Ticket completeness
Tickets are meant to address customer issues and gather data efficiently. Ticketing done well leads to better customer experiences overall. You can categorize tickets into two types:
- Issue type
- Sub-issue type
Metrics you need to track in order to ensure tickets are categorized and done properly include:
- % of categorized tickets: The percentage of tickets an individual or team has completed within a specific time frame that have issue type and sub-issue type recorded
- # of tickets complete under “Issue Type” category
- # of tickets complete with “Sub-Issue Type” categorized
- # of no contract tickets complete: These refer to the number of tickets that are not attached to a contract and are therefore difficult to charge for
- 2. Ticket SLA
Service level agreements (SLA) are a great way to prove your value to customers by giving great customer service. Key metrics in this area are:
- Average first response time: The average time from ticket submission to first response
- Average resolution time: The average time between when a ticket is submitted to when it gets filed under resolution
- # of complete tickets: The number of tickets filed under “complete”
- 3. Ticket escalation
Ticket escalation measures the efficiency of your help desk and how well your CSRs execute SLAs on first contact. In a perfect world, there would be zero escalations and 100% fulfillment of SLAs. Since you live in an imperfect world, it’s important to track these metrics:
- # of escalation tickets complete: escalation tickets are those that have secondary resources
- # of tickets complete without escalation: In other words, the number of tickets that don’t have secondary resources
- % of tickets complete without escalation: The percentage of tickets completed without secondary resources out of all tickets completed
Gamify your help desk around these metrics, align activities with them, and you are sure to start seeing better results. Not only that, the process will enable you to spot high performers who should be rewarded and positioned to help or train the others lagging behind. Finally, these metrics enable you to quickly identify where improvements need to be made and where training resources need to be allocated.
Implement gamification the right way using Crewhu
Nobody understands the power of gamification to improve performance better than Crewhu. We help MSPs incorporate gaming activities into employee engagement endeavors, along with contests, reward systems, peer-to-peer recognition, feedback loops, and much more. If you want to take away any doubt about getting the most out of your help desk through successful gamification and employee recognition, schedule a demo with Crewhu today.
