Does anyone have suggestions for incentives for their team and if so what measurements do you use?

Kind of an interesting question. My answer is, why do you want to offer incentives? Don't consider incentives until you know what actions you are trying to encourage, otherwise it's like putting the cart before the horse.

Decide what's important to your team, what will drive your success.

We found out that nobody in our industry segment cares about One Call Resolution, so now we do. Our new focus is on one call res. We have even established a training program around it . Last month we gave a small prize ($25 gas card) and a hand crafted trophy to the agent with the best one call res ratio. OK, so it was a bowling pin with a company sticker on it, but hey, you would have thought we gave away the Hope diamond. Everyone was applauding and patting the winner on the back. We built excitement in the department, put the focus on resolving customer issues quickly and it cost us a whopping for $25. Sometimes the best incentives are recognition for a job well done.

Hey Franknsr,

You're exactly right and that's exactly what I'm looking to do. I want to provide an incentive (I was thinking of movie tickets) to the agent who consistently exceeds expectations, maybe he went the extra mile to rush a delivery to a customer, or explained the attributes of a product line, etc. My problem is how to determine/measure which agent is doing it the most. I'm not looking for a formula but I need an objective way to rate them all.

Why not let your customers decide who's doing a good job. Any of your CSR's get compliments from customers or management? Do you make CSI calls? You could also just follow Tom Peters advice and "catch someone doing something right". One of my personal fav's is rewarding team work. CSR's helping CSR's.

When someone displays a positve attitude at our place I tell the VP and he gives them a Subway coupon for lunch. He loves doing it and the extra recognition goes a long way.

BTW, I love the movie pass idea - I'm stealing that one from you. ;-)

Hi,

I agree with Franknsr... if a customer appreciates a CSR you can give away a cash price or some sort of a gift. If you are going to come up with e.g. employee of the month,, then this would be monotonous. Encouraging individuals is important but I do believe that you should encourage them as a whole team too. Give them a target and tell them that if they achieved it the whole team would get an incentive.(make sure that this is something very luxuries) then the team mates will encourage the under performers to come up with better practice with out your involvement.

Reward a CSR who runs the extra mile. This will enourage others go beyond their way to help the customer. You can give away gift vouchers from an exclusive shop.

Harindra

G'Day

When looking into an incentive program to implement into the organisation, it is important to get your team 'buy-in'. You need to meet and discuss with your team what motivates them. For some, it is financial - e.g a monetary reward; it might be that formal verbal and/or public recognition drives someone; others might find material items a motivator as mentioned as an example, movie tickets; some may be inclined to be motivated by weekly small rewards followed by a quarterly and then annual prize - such as a weekend away, or team dinners, or I have even seen time in lieu as a motivating incentive. There are many more that you can look at as examples, however my primary point is that everyone is driven by something different, hence for a successful result, it is important that you as a team decide on what the incentives are, not that they are dictated by management.

My recent employer had no incentive or reward and recognition programs running. I began by designing a basic certificate and throughout the week, rewarding for exceeding KPI's and soft skills excellence i.e. providing outstanding customer service, or going beyond the status quo to achieve quality through continuous improvement etc. At the end of each week, points are allocated with free coffee vouchers, and monthly rewards going out for lunch at the local cafe - all financed by the company. The certificates are given publicly so that the team recognises each others efforts. Motivation is high, results are improving, team morale is excellent and customer service is at a far more genuine and positive level.

I have in the past held a team meeting, asked the team to think about what they feel would reward and recognise them and at the same time provide value to the role they play and the service they provide. I gave them 2 weeks as a team to come up with a plan involving timeframes, budget constraints, KPI inclusion and customer satisfaction. By allowing the team to work together to organise and create this, they bought into the project and the commitment level was greater, hence achieving greater results. Staff retention also improved.

Just some thoughts

Cheers

Stevie (Aust)

Hi All,
This is a great topic to discuss,
I recently implemented a measurement tool in my department, I have a full time Quality Control employee that records agents phone conversations and marks random phone calls based on 12 measurements: starting from courteousness, politeness and enthusiastic until rules, policies and procedures and gets a scored accordingly, then will this QC person sit with each individual agent and coach them in the areas where they need help and even let them listen in into the recording if necessary .
We've done this now for a few months and I can say that we had a wonderful experience with that and we see lots of improvement.
I'm now working on an incentives program to reward them accordingly, I've looked into a company called Perks http://www.incentiveprograms.com/ I hope to setup an account with them shortly.

All the best, thanx for all to share valuable information.

Isaacst
Hey Isaacst, Could you share that scorecard with me. My email is acm@goprodigy.com

I'd really appreciate it.

We all decided on a team "player of the month" (the team thought this was funny considering the different meanings of the word player). Each team member nominates another team member who they think has been most helpful either towards them or others. They then receive a £50 Amazon voucher and their name gets placed on a plaque showing who won each month.

Hi!

All great ideas. We currently have a quality monitoring program in place that I supervise. I am always looking for new ideas to innovate our agents and there are a lot of them on here. We currently give $25.00 to any agent that received a score of 100% in 1 month and if they receive the score of 100% for 3 months they receive $100.00 visa gift card. I am looking to do something that is less inexpensive, innovative, and fun. So all of these ideas are great!

Hi Chaunda

One additional thought...... to reinforce the value of the Reps receiving the recognition have a think about creating small posters ( A4 size is fine for this ). When my team receive accolades I take their picture and paste the commentary from the note/email onto the poster. The poster is laminated and placed up on our "wall of fame" . The posters are highly visible as you must walk past them to enter the centre. Every time we put up a new poster Reps always stop to read and talk about the latest "legend" when going on breaks. We also give out movie tickets ( 2 not 1 ). This works a treat when clients visit as well!!!

That is a good idea wendyb. Thank you! I know another supervisor here mentioned the wall of fame, but nothing ever came of it. I think now is a time to put it in play especially since our fiscal year is coming around.

Hello All,

New to the site and this is my first post.

I was interested in this topic as it is an ongoing area of interest for me and my peers in the business (Casinos in Ontario). We have done many things from verbal to money incentives and one thing is, is that we constantly need to upgrade and change things. One other challenge was the continued commitment from staff, meaning we wanted to extent the "competitive" nature of the initiative for as long as we could.

The latest thing we came up with was a Race that would have multiple ways to advanced spaces on a game board that mimics a Horse Race. They earn spaces by accomplishing the following:

- Filling out Bingo cards that have spots on them that I and our staff Customer Service Excellence Team have come up with. These spots have examples of customer service opportunities for staff such as giving a new customer a tour, getting a customer to mention them doing a great job on a comment card, helping another department to accomplish a task, getting a certain number of membership sign ups (we have a customer loyalty card), ..etc (KPI based of course but suggested by the staff on the team)
- Job Well Done forms from Supervisors
- Recognition of Excellence, these are given by Coordinators and Managers to staff for jobs and acts of "above and beyond" customer service.

Anyway, so obtaining any or all of these allows the staff member to move forward, the staff member to reach the end first, or the person out front at the end of month is the Winner. This person receives a certificate, trophy and money for a local coffee place. We also use them in the staffs Performance Evaluations.

What we found was that it accomplished a few things, Reward, Education on Customer Service tools to use and Extended the desire to perform well for the month.

It has been a great success for us.

Hello

I like your idea of the bingo card. We also do something similiar. We had our team design and create a game board. A great team building event. We also had them submit questions relating to their job. Once a week the game is placed. Everyone is asked two questions relating to their jobs. (This helps everyone to reinforce their job skills). For each question you get correct, you get to roll the dice and advance your game piece. We have a winner every quarter. The winner gets to go for a lunch with their supervisor (longer than an hour) during the working day. They also get 50 (REACH) points. The REACH program is another incentive tool we have where they collect points for different targets that they reach and when they have so many accumulated, they can cash them in for a gift card (HBC, Canadian Tire, Walmart, etc) or save up 150 for a day off. Incentives work well as long as the reason you are doing them is not forgotten.