Balto's Gamification
Enhancing the Call Center space with gamified experiences
Role
Lead Designer & Researcher
Tools
Figma & Dovetail
Team
Product Trio
BACKGROUND
With the help of artificial intelligence, Balto Software guides Call Center Agents on 100% of calls while quickly adapting to any scenario that may happen during each call. However, Agent NPS scores consistently showed low levels of satisfaction, indicating that Balto wasn't something all agents wanted to use on a daily basis; it was something they were forced to use.
CHALLENGE
Call centers are notorious for high Agent turnovers; largely due to the repetitive nature of their work, low pay, inflexible schedules, lack of training, a high stress environment, and high burnout factor. Adding gamification-like experiences to Call Centers has had a proven track record of improving Agent productivity and excitement.
Unfortunately, most Managers do not have the time or capacity to focus on consistently running contests & incentives, given that it's usually a manual effort. How could we create an exciting, yet non-distracting experience for Agents, while also improving their manager's workflows?
OPPORTUNITY
Balto set out to enhance the Agent experience and engagement. Incorporating gamification into an Agent’s workday would not only assist in driving performance by focusing on low-performing areas, but would also add some measure of delight to their day-to-day activities.
PROCESS
As the primary end-to-end designer for this project, my process was to:
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Identify opportunities where gamified experiences would bring value to new and tenured Agents within Call Centers; anyone seeking to improve their actions and behaviors, all while incentivizing and engaging them, daily.
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Perform generative research to familiarize myself on gamification and our target market.
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Conduct primary interviews with internal stakeholders and customers to get a better understanding of what our end users’ needs and wants were.
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Map out the manager-cloud & agent-app sitemap to help simplify and trim off unnecessary pages while making sure I focused on the important features users would need.
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Perform another set of exploratory interviews, aimed to validate our MLP designs via prototype walk-throughs to ensure they met our users’ needs and expectations.
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Work closely with an illustrator to design the look and feel of Balto's first round of badges for lite mode & dark mode.
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Translate mid-fidelity wireframes into high-fidelity.
Persona 1 | Agents
Benchmark
Persona 2 | Managers
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Generative Research Findings:
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89% of agents say gamification makes them feel more productive and happier at work
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85% of agents say they’d spend more time on an app or software because of gamification elements
✨ Key Research Findings:
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Competing against others or within a team can drive competition, performance and motivation for new and tenured agents
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Competing against ones’ self removes the stigma of failure or coming in last
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Current contests have agents and managers feeling stagnant; resulting in short-lived engagement
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Not all badges have to be tied to physical rewards
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Managers want the ability to setup and maintain challenges and badges, but at minimal effort
TESTING & PROTOTYPING
To make sure we were able to bring gamification from inception to implementation within the set timeframe, we had to cut scope and features out one-by-one. After creating a few design iterations based on what could be produced for MLP and reviewing with my product trio team, I began transforming my mid-fidelity wireframes into high-fidelity for both Manager (Cloud) and Agent (Agent App) workflows.
Mid-Fidelity Flows | Manager Cloud (Template Version ❌)
Our original idea for how managers could create and manage challenges was through templates. However, our goal for MLP was to make this flow as easy-as-possible for users, so we decided to move this idea to the next/later bucket.
Mid-Fidelity Flows | Manager Cloud (MLP Version ✅)
With this iteration, managers would be able to: view the 10-15 default challenges we would provide for them, click "Create challenge", add a start and end date, add participants, and toggle "activate" to start a challenge for their agents.
Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Manager Cloud's MLP version
Mid-Fidelity Flows | Agent App (MLP Version ✅)
As for the Agent App, our goal was to make the newer interface simple yet not-distracting for MLP. By adding the Activity feed, Profile, and Challenges panels, agents would be able to quickly see which challenges they were participating in, view challenge details (including how they were performing on each call), and which badges (rewards) they had unlocked (or still needed to).
Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Agent App's MLP version
UP NEXT
We are gearing up to conduct Pilot sessions with the first version of Balto's Gamification where we will continue to gather customer feedback and make improvements. By incorporating discovery continuously throughout our developmental process, we are able to build something that our customers want and will enjoy.
