A distributed social workforce drives profit and performance

Creating a community was a first step, but the next iteration of community management involved facilitating positive community behaviors like collaboration and healthy competition. While agents are bidding against each other for work, they are not engaged in a zero-sum game - if agents are successful at meeting client expectations as a group, they will bring more business to themselves as well as to other LiveOps independent contractor agents. Thus, it’s in the individual’s rational best interest to help other agents to improve even though they are still in competition.

Agent to Agent forum post: “I have to tell you that it was your tips and tricks on selling which I took to my phone calls and increase my sales on Saturday. I now use the same technique on all my calls... I am still not converting as well as I would like on all 3 products, but I am working on it. I don't get a lot of these calls, but with each sale I know that it all makes a difference.”

We have found this to be true in practice as well as theory. LiveOps began to facilitate cooperation using a knowledge base and forums so that agents can share best practices with each other, as well as tools for peer coaching and networking. These tools also facilitate competition, because an agent who actively works on improving their skills using the aforementioned tools (as well as our e-learning suite) is able to get more business in a results-oriented environment.

 3. Gamification or Game Mechanics to drive improved performance

With competition in mind, we began to think about what agents needed to better understand how to build their businesses. Gaming was a great framework to think about this problem since it involves a community built around healthy competition. The competitive nature of agents has led to negative situations where system rules are set in such a way that they can be exploited – for example, if a client’s major success metric is limiting the time an agent spends on the phone with a customer and ties this directly to compensation, we would expect a small percentage of agents to rush callers off the line instead of producing a high quality customer interaction. If only customer satisfaction is considered for compensation, we would expect some agents to transfer away irate callers to avoid lower pay stemming from lower net promoter scores since a call is no longer associated with them.

However, competition can be your best friend in building a strong community by using clever system design to avoid these negative examples. Our next generation of community management involved providing instant and/or relevant feedback on performance and quality using gaming mechanisms. While the constructs we deploy are not by themselves novel, we find that their use creates outsized returns because they more rapidly connect an agent’s individual action and behavior with tangible outcomes; an agent who spends time improving their skills through Certification or achieving high quality metrics can then compare themselves to their peers using a leaderboard or other online social identity displays.

In fact, we’ve found that game mechanics drives even better performance and insight than just facilitating community interaction.

Agent Post: “We did it team  back on top of the leaderboard, let’s keep this momentum going, work lots of commits and keep converting, thanks to all for the great team effort!

By channeling the competitiveness in a positive way we’ve created a net benefit to our clients.  With rapid feedback comes even more accountability: if you managed to pacify an upset caller, everyone can know you did a great job - and if you didn’t reach a client’s expectations for service, it’s very motivating to see that you need to improve, every day you work!

4. Living in the social/mobile modern reality

LiveOps agents have one more large advantage because they are onshore contact center workers: they are themselves social consumers. We’ve found that LiveOps agents are immersed in a web 2.0 world – 79% are on Facebook – which makes them great brand ambassadors in today’s social/mobile reality. We’ve responded by deeply ingraining our client’s brands into our platform and have tapped into advances in social networking to create a more engaging environment than a brick-and-mortar contact center experience. Like Facebook, we’ve been able to study social behavior using data analytics to create our award-winning e-learning modules. These insights have also helped us to design tools for creating a customer conversation across channels with a consistent brand image. Through this we’re able to transform customer interactions in the cloud.

Challenges and solutions

1. Challenge: Create shared purpose and high quality customer-facing organization in a distributed virtual workforce with no managers

Solution: Engage workforce by facilitating ownership and cooperation in a self-managing community. Workforce is empowered to drive consumer performance and shares in overall community success through clear client goals and measurement. Provide transparency into performance and let agents make their own choices about how to achieve client mandates.  Define workforce opportunities and clearly state success goals and allow for individuals to opt-in to participate, catering to individual desires to succeed and excel.

2. Challenge: Foster peer-to-peer interactions and certification programs to allow self-paced skills improvement with little to no incentive for completion. All tools would have to be relevant to new independent agents, as-well-as seasoned agents who would be motivated to return and continue to participate.

Solution: Created an online community with gamification, reputation features, and awards that would engage and motivate independent agents. Providing up-to-date opportunities for work, clear indication of individual performance metrics relative to client goals, and leaderboards showing community frontrunners. Providing for online identity building through creation of a personal avatar and the ability to customize it by earning online points for positive behaviors. The avatar then becomes a method of identity and reputation in the community, quickly allowing for agents to recognize each other and self form groups. Points that are used to customize avatars are earned through performance goals, certification completion, and community interactions.  Also created customize avatar items for individual clients to further create social identity for high performers and allow for expertise mining by low performing individuals. For example, an avatar t-shirt with the client’s logo was only awarded to high performers with select metrics. Creating agent transparency showing high performer metrics and certification they completed drives self motivated performance improvement. Lastly, created learning mechanisms that facilitate ongoing peer-to-peer performance improvement using chat, blogs, and independent team formation.

3. Challenge: Address rapidly changing social aspects of teaming and competition

Solution: Use social consumers to also be the social workers. Leverage a social learning methodology to baseline independent agent knowledge through eLearning courseware, situational simulations, blogs, podcasts, virtual classroom sessions with role playing, and static reference guides to provide a consistent brand presence across many communication channels. This distance learning model facilitates peer-to-peer interactions and produces organic formation of teams that self promote a shared goal with individual pursuit.

4. Challenge:  Help agents understand performance that is driven by a wide range of skill types – for example, customer service calls (with softer metrics) as opposed to sales-driven calls that have order value / sales (as hard metrics)

Solution:  Created new metrics and measures to help contractors evaluate their own performance against performance targets set by the client – including customer and process satisfaction performance indicators.  Expose the skill types that agents need to succeed as client metrics embedded in the agent gaming experience.  

Benefits and metrics

1. Our US-based virtual workforce of independent contractors has many benefits:

• agent turnover rates are low compared to brick and mortar
• demographic matching to target-client’s US consumers
• faster training times with large agent community carrying previous work experience and skills

2. Community management techniques provided more engagement than traditional management techniques. Following the launch of internal gaming platform:

• 80% opt-in rate in first week, with 75% of agents returning to site on a bi-weekly basis to participate in challenges
• 3.5 min average time spent on site (compared to 1 min average for internet)
• Certification (not required) that was promoted with badge and point awards was completed by 72% of agents
• Decreased Onboarding process from 4 Weeks of classroom training to 14 hours. Drastically reduced speed to proficiency by producing higher quality agents in a shorter period of time.

3. Gamification techniques produce superior client outcomes:

• Service levels improved by about 10%
• Average time to handle a customer inquiry decreased by almost 15%
• Sales performance improvement of 8%-12%

Lessons

• Motivating workers is easier when they understand not only the expectations for their performance, but also their relative performance to their peers. While we’ve illustrated this within the context of a distributed workplace, similar mechanisms have been used successfully in more traditional “brick and mortar” offices using cloud software products like Rypple or SuccessFactors.
• It’s not as easy to jump into a classic gamification implementation – where users earn points for actions with associated rewards - as it may seem.  We’ve determined that iterative testing of gaming mechanisms in a community is the most consistent way to work towards this endpoint. Partnering with a vendor who provides a gamification platform (such as Badgeville, Bunchball, Big Door or others) can be a great way to start experimenting with your workforce. 
• Our workforce always has individuals who are extremely competitive. If the rules of the system are unsophisticated, a portion will try to game the system and quickly exploit inefficiencies for personal benefit.  A truly sharp organization will use these same personality types to actually drive improved results-based performance, and recognize that any systems rules will have to co-evolve as new behaviors develop.
• Consumers are increasingly requiring on-demand service. To meet these needs, companies need a highly self-motivated workforce that will immerse itself in their branding – which has the fortuitous side-effect of driving even more value from customer touch points. Businesses should look to leverage workers who are familiar with social media and have other shared cultural understanding with end customers to make the most of client facing interactions.
• Communities that are self-managed are communities of passion. We notified our agent community about this article and encouraged them to read and comment on their own experiences. You can clearly see the engagement and passion that our independent contractors have for their work and our platform – and their success with clients speaks for itself! If you give control of livelihood to your workers rather than to bureaucrats, you will be amazed at the results.