7 Call Center Games for Better Customer Service

Keeping customers satisfied is a priority in every call center, but we all know maintaining high satisfaction rates can be an ongoing challenge.

Customers expect to receive help from well-trained, polite, honest call center agents in every communication. The quality of the support they receive has a direct impact on their overall experience — and letting them down makes them extremely unlikely to return.

One major aspect of delivering exceptional customer service is keeping your agents motivated and engaged to do their best. Effective training is crucial, of course, but playing call center customer service games online or in person are a fantastic (yet underrated) performance booster.

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What Are The Best Customer Service Training Games?

We’ve put together seven different ideas for fun in-person customer service games that can help to boost your agents’ productivity, focus and results. All call center customer service games should offer a prize for winners, such as an extra day of paid vacation, a gift card or a meal for two.

1. Hangman

The classic game of guessing letters to save a stick figure’s life.

This is a terrific addition to your range of call center games, allowing you to recap key elements from training sessions and keep agents refreshed. The rules are basically the same, though the actual process is given a neat twist.

Get a large sheet of paper and some markers. Gather a team together after they’ve undergone training, whether it’s an hour later or the next day. Split them into two separate groups.

Each group should prepare questions based on the training. For example, what is the right response to X complaint? They will pitch their questions to the opposing team, and any incorrect answers mean another addition to the hangman.

The game ends when one team has given too many incorrect responses and fills in the poor stick figure.

This helps to get agents reflecting on what they’ve learned in a fun, informal way. It aids team-bonding too.

2. The Ball Steal

This is quick and easy to set up and is a great example of how much fun call center games for customer service can be.

Give each agent a set of five balls (these may be small rubber ones or tennis balls) at the start of the day.

Whenever one agent secures a sale or hits outstanding metrics, they take a ball from someone else. The agent who has the biggest collection of balls at the end of the day wins.

3. Who’s the Celebrity?

This is one of the simplest call center games for customer service teams to arrange and encourages agents to hit their targets before others can. All you need to do is print out an image of a celebrity, pin it to a wall in full view of your team and cover it up with a grid of sticky notes.

Each time an agent makes a sale or meets some other criteria (such as earning great customer feedback), they get to remove a sticky note from the board. Whoever identifies the celebrity on their turn gets the prize.

Print out a few pictures to keep the game going throughout the day. You can offer clues and should vary celebrities by industry or era.

4. Absurd Complaints

Handling complaints well is a key part of running a successful call center, but not all agents are as skilled in this area as they should be.

Split your team into two groups and present them with a number of complaints (between five and 10). One should be genuine while the rest are fake. Ideally, you should find the most ridiculous true complaint you can — one that’s hard to actually resolve.

Make the other complaints equally or more absurd to ensure your agents have to think hard about resolving the issue in a professional way. Once they’ve offered their ideas, invite them to guess which one was false. If they both get it right, the team with the most professional responses should get the prize.

This is one of the more unusual call center customer service games online, but it is definitely effective.

5. Pass the Present

This game works with either an actual wrapped gift or a simple envelope, depending on the prize inside.

Choose three or four rewards (like a gift card, a note representing an extra day’s paid vacation, and a box of luxury chocolates) and wrap them as a present or slip them into an envelope.

Whenever someone makes a sale or hits a specific metric target, they will be given one of these presents/envelopes. These are passed from one agent to another as they hit their respective goals.

Whoever is holding onto the gift by the end of the day will get to open it and keep the prize!

Like these other call center games for customer service, this is a simple motivational aid with a tangible incentive. The sense of mystery keeps your agents guessing and builds suspense too.

6. Building the Team Bus

This is another popular call center training game. It’s a quick, simple team-building exercise that helps agents focus and work together.

It’s easy to start — just split your team into groups and invite them to draw an outline of a bus on a sheet of paper. Within a set period (10, 20, or 30 minutes) they should start to add different touches to the bus and explain how they can promote good teamwork.

For example, sketching headlights onto the front of the bus would help the team see the way forward and reach their destination. Adding mirrors would enable the agents to look back at what they’ve learned and experienced to help them get ahead more efficiently.

Give the team with the most helpful additions the prize.

7. A Game of Unique Goals

Using Playvox’s monitoring and feedback capabilities, you can provide each agent with a set number of goals to meet in future calls.

Take a look at each agent’s performance metrics and random interactions, and identify where they should improve. Give them three goals to work toward for the rest of the day or week and offer them a prize for each one they achieve.

They may not be able to hit all three targets, but they don’t have to. If they have a real incentive to focus on, their overall performance will improve exponentially.

7 Call Center Games for Better Customer Service

Keep Your Contact Center Fun

There’s no doubt that games in the customer service workplace can increase your team’s engagement and productivity. By trying out a few of these games, you’ll see your team grow and bond — and perform better.

Have you integrated any of these call center customer service games into your call center’s everyday processes? What results have you achieved since? Tell us in the comments!

If you’re managing a hybrid team, you know that comes with a unique set of challenges. Check out our eBook, How to Effectively Manage a Hybrid Work Environment for Customer Service Agents, for some tips!