Best Contact Center Games to Play Remotely

At the heart of every contact center is a team of agents who want to show up every day and do their best work. Even when your agents are working remotely, a strong team spirit is central to customer satisfaction and agent performance. How do the best call center managers keep morale high and performance strong when agents aren’t able to interact in person and enjoy the camaraderie of a vibrant contact center?

They play contact center games.

Games not only bring people together around a common goal, they encourage friendly competition and ensure interactions with customers are the best they can be. We encourage managers to set aside some time for play on a regular basis.

It’s the perfect time to connect in a way that agents appreciate and everyone can learn from.

Contact Center Games Remote Agents Love

1. Trivia Challenge – Set up a lively game of trivia questions and divide agents into teams. They can collaborate to answer questions together and keep score. Trivia questions could involve identifying national flags, lines from famous movies, or questions related to the work your company does. Zoom is a great way to conduct virtual trivia nights. The Zoom breakout room feature helps create different rooms for different trivia themes, so you can conduct different activities at once and engage your various agents interests.

2. Contact Center Quiz – This is similar to the trivia challenge, except this game Includes questions that quizzes agents on contact center specific knowledge. A great way to improve performance and meet team goals is to mix in key learnings with quiz questions. You can create quizzes inside of an agent optimization suite, where point values are easily assignable and your agents are already familiar with the platform.

3. New Knowledge – Coach your agents on Monday to learn a new skill. Have them apply it on a customer call that same week. Then listen to a call in which they tried to use what they learned. If they applied what they learned successfully, give them a reward such as a gift card.

4. Scavenger Hunt – Scavenger hunts aren’t just for the office. Create teams of agents and give each team a list of items to find in their houses. Not every team member needs to find every item. Instead, teams work together to divide up the list and find items they each have, bringing them all together to complete the list. Agents can show each item on camera as proof they found each one. For the scavenger hunt, you can create a Google Doc form fill for every agent to input the photos of the things they need to find. Then, you can share some of the best photos in a Slack channel dedicated solely to the scavenger hunt itself, to continue building morale and create inter-company communication.

5. Bingo – This classic game can be easily adapted for remote workers. Create bingo cards and send one to everyone on your team. They can be different for each player. (Here’s a free downloadable template for making Bingo cards.) If you’d like, ask teammates to suggest ideas for spaces to make it a more collaborative effort. Pick one person to call out an item or phrase. If the player has it on their card, they mark that space. Once a player has marked all the spaces in a row — horizontal, vertical or diagonal — they call out “Bingo!” The moderator can keep score and give the person who wins the most rounds a small prize.

Don’t miss these additional contact center games for even more ideas, 7 Call Center Games for Better Customer Service (several of which can be adapted for remote teams.) Our favorite lives right inside Playvox. It’s designed to provide incentives and recognition that inspire higher team performance.

For more call center game ideas, check out these suggestions from Call Center Helper. They’re optimized for motivating and training agents, whether they’re working remotely or at the same location.

Choosing Between Contact Center Games and Contests

In addition to contact center games, contests are a great way to motivate and give your team tangible rewards for doing their best work. Contact center contests are the original form of gamification.

Research on gamification in the workplace proves that game-based motivation with the right execution makes 90% of employees more productive and improves overall workplace engagement by 48%.

One of the most effective and fun contests in a contact center involves daily perks. Here’s how to play: 

Choose a metric you want to improve. Give a prize to the person who improved most on that metric, using their past performance as a benchmark. This levels the playing field, giving all agents an equal shot at winning. Having quality assurance software that tracks agents’ performance makes this easy. Daily perks can be anything from gourmet coffee, a lottery ticket, a gift card, or perhaps an extra break.

It is important to note that not every game needs to become a contest. Some games are great for morale boosting, some games are great for team collaboration, and others are great for friendly competition. It is important to incorporate a good mix of call center games so your agents are constantly working together in new and exciting ways.

Related Article: 5 Proven Strategies to Help Remote Contact Center Agents Feel Valued

Coaching Agents to Build on Success

To supplement contact center games, we encourage managers to use a range of agent coaching methods and tools — from buddying to benchmarking to one-on-one sessions — so you can help agents stay at the top of their game.

At a time when companies are hiring team members who can work from anywhere, remote and hybrid work environments will become increasingly commonplace. Have a look through all of our remote work resources so you can manage your call center wherever agents need to operate. Playvox makes it easier than ever to lead a remote customer service team — and have fun while doing it.

Get your free trial today so we can help you and your agents do their best work from anywhere.