A leaderboard, at its core, is just a ranked list of your team members. It can rank them based on the number of calls or chats taken each day, it can calculate KPIs, display the hours that have been worked, the customer satisfaction surveys and so on. Leaderboards are a valuable tool for a contact center, or any organization that has incoming / outgoing interactions with clients (be it over tickets, live chat, Twitter or plain old fashioned telephone). If you do not have one then make it your top priority to implement one.
I will give you three top reasons to use a leaderboard for your organization.
A Leaderboard Increases The Desire To Excel
A Leaderboard Provides Instant Feedback
A Leaderboard Streamlines Communication
As humans we get motivated by challenges, and a leaderboard allows team members to visualize their own challenge. They can look at the leaderboard and figure out where they are in the ranking, and see what they need to do to get the top spots. Every effort put towards meeting the challenge will be rewarded by a commensurate rise in rank.
Team members no longer have to wait a week for the results to be tabulated in a spreadsheet. They no longer have to wonder what the formula is, and how they stack up compared to the rest of the organization. They can simply look at the leaderboard to see how they are doing at any time of the day. If they fall behind, then they know what to do to get back up. If they are on top, then they will know what to do to maintain their rank.
A big chunk of communication between team leaders and team members basically amounts to a boring status update: "we have done X, we need to do Y" that gets repeated throughout the day. Leaderboards cut down on that type of chatter since the data is immediately available to all. A team member that works at night can immediately look at the leaderboard and see how the day shift did without asking the team leader. This frees up time to communicate about more important things both for the leader and the team members.
We have implemented a leaderboard at Spring Merchant from the very beginning and it has made life a lot easier, both on team leaders and team members. Next week, I will show you a couple of things that you can add to your leaderboard to get the most out of it.
Consider the points above and see if it makes sense to implement a leaderboard for your organization. If not, then let me know below why you opted against it (I am sure you have your reasons)!