From wine to pharmacy sales, gamification is quickly becoming a tool for marketers to attract and retain customers in a subscription economy. Yet at its core, gamification is a leading method to teach, retrain, and engage employees. We recently spoke with Teleperformance about their gamification practice and the benefits of implementing comprehensive game-based learning.

Game-based learning methodology

Teleperformance began its active investments in gamification in 2018 under its High Touch, High Tech strategy, starting with research on intrinsic motivation. It launched TP Training Lab in Colombia to build a learning methodology targeted towards the younger employee demographic. At the core of the approach are the techniques of learning by doing, learner autonomy, and interaction with others. It used participatory teaching methods and contextualized the information using video games. Teleperformance estimates that more than 90% of its agents play video games and are users of digital content.

It builds the training program, beginning with new hire training needs assessment, followed by an analysis of customer contact drivers, KPIs, and performance data for the client in order to analyze the curriculum and training content across time and themes. Then it designs the agenda with specific tools for each scenario such as simulations, immersive experience, and micro-learning, as follows:

• Experience learning using Constructor, digital showrooms, and app emulators
• Data learning using Pareto analysis, contribution graphs, and playbooks
• Reference learning using proprietary tools and platforms: TP Book, TP Simulation, and TP Arcade.

Once agents learn the material, Teleperformance measures the knowledge acquisition, retention rates and training effectiveness for each part of the curriculum. The company also has a proprietary platform for agents to locate information independently.

Experience learning with custom tools

Constructor is a Minecraft environment created by the lab with the client and customized by delivery region, where the trainee can practice specific tasks in a process. An example is to maintain battery charging in a renewable energy-powered house to teach the concept of solar energy. The learning targets can be independent decision-making or teamwork for multiplayer setups.

For example, Teleperformance had two groups of trainees with and without Minecraft-based training for a retention program. While both groups met their dollar retention value and support percentage targets in the first 30 days of operation, the one using the gamified training achieved a 15% higher retention rate with a larger trainee group.

Over six to eight weeks, TP Training Lab builds a custom digital showroom with personalized experiences on Unreal Engine for video games. The trainee explores a virtual environment and interacts with products and devices; for example, in a technical support scenario for network connectivity. Within the digital showroom, the gamer can also interact with rich media such as animation and video. Teleperformance has Digital Showroom implementations in home automation, connected homes, manufacturing, and the restaurant business.

Performance gamification with TP Gamification

TP Gamification is a SaaS platform that uses game, social, and reputation mechanics to motivate and engage employees. It turns the daily KPI targets to game achievements for the agents to earn points, move between levels, and win rewards. It has real-time dashboards tracking individual performance and different levels of access for agents, team leaders, and business managers. It bucketizes employees by performance quartiles to segment the targets. The company decides on targets such as schedule adherence, FCR, and quality score for each game. The platform can link with knowledge bases and e-learning databases. The leaderboards are broadcast on the operation floors. Teleperformance has ~10k daily active users, with typical implementations at LOB level.

An example deployment in 2020 is for a U.K. multinational investment bank with ~114 FTEs working from home and delivering customer support over the phone and back-office activities. Teleperformance identified employee behavior gaps by mining data across unified communications, WFM, quality and survey tools. Then it designed games focused on improved productivity and knowledge by awarding points, badges, and quests. It also introduced a reward system to recognize top performers. The game setup has custom features such as the ability for team leaders to challenge agents, run competitions, assign and publish custom quizzes. As a result, over an eight-week period, the program reduced “not ready” and on-hold time, decreased AHT by 11%, increased critical accuracy score in the back-office to 100% from low 90%s, and improved productivity by 22%.

In another TP Gamification roll out in a sales program for an Indian banking client, the program achieved 70% improvement in talk time and 54% improvement in the number of sales.

Gamification at scale

With ~380k employees globally, Teleperformance looked to develop quick mass scale gamification for general skill development and knowledge checks. Partnering with an external provider, it launched Training Arcade, a gaming portal and game authoring tool with eight games such as Jump, Scramble, or Jeopardy! Games can be played individually or as a team. It democratizes game creation, publishing, and sharing of a new game in five minutes. Teleperformance has 150 arcade game creators and between January and May 2021 made over 2.5k games with 647k game sessions played by 118k employees.

Example deployments include:

• A CPG brand in Spain looking to stimulate participation, make knowledge checks more interesting, and improve, revise and recall knowledge outside training hours. TP created questions based on the most difficult topics and ones with the lowest quality scores. TP Arcade improved the average quality score by 12% between January and February 2021
• A U.K. travel client aiming to engage and leverage several learning concepts, reinforce critical topics, and improve speed to competency. The TP Arcade games with questions based on analysis of errors and common queries on the floor improved accuracy by ~4% in 2021.

An essential element in the learning approach

With the increased complexity of customer interactions, expansion into products and services ecosystems, and the addition of new generation employees with new learning expectations, Teleperformance is pinning gamification as an essential element in its learning approach.

It has already started deploying its gamified learning environments on VDI and running the TP Gamification leaderboards on individual screens to cater to work-at-home and remote workers. It continues to collect data from the tools and feedback from creators to optimize game choice and add new functionality such as challenges to Training Arcade. It will also integrate more learning items such as video. It plans to create journeys with different skillsets and levels as part of the learning path in Training Arcade. Next, it will add experience points for employees to purchase in-game and real-world prizes.