Avanade Explores Benefits, Risks of Adding Gamification to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Call Center Solutions

Any CIO knows that an enterprise system is only as valuable as its level of user adoption.  Measures of user experience and engagement can be difficult to harness, but the concept of gamification in the enterprise has already started changing the mentality of  IT departments by disrupting preconceptions about superficial contests and silly prizes give way to more legitimate use cases.

In the CRM realm, Microsoft global partner Avanade is charting a path to gamification for Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the call center with an approach that attempts to keep the best qualities of gamification while maintaining management controls. Poorly planned incentives, un-targeted challenges, and meaningless goals can run the promise of gamification into the ground, and cost the IT department its credibility.

According to Avanade's director of software and cloud services Barry Givens, Dynamics CRM in the call center is the perfect place to demonstrate how to implement gamification correctly.  But doing it right means planning, thoughtfulness, and careful management.  "There need to be many ways to win that are blessed by management and that allow managers to communicate what is important," Givens explains. 

Imagine a call center team whose goals change as call center conditions change, perhaps monthly, weekly, or even daily.  The goal one week may be to boost call volume by twenty percent; later that month, it may become hitting a new customer satisfaction level.  If managers can dial those goals into the call center application with visible queues and point tracking at the time that they are valid - and also dial them down again when they became less important - it should send the teams and the individual employees the message that management is offering a ...