Bunchball’s gamification technology has sparked T-Mobile to launch a nationwide effort to motivate its customer care and retail store representatives to make T-Mobile's online social business community their go-to resource for answering customer questions.
As a result, T-Mobile is driving up customer satisfaction scores by engaging more than 30,000 frontline representatives so they can effectively respond to customers' queries, even as the devices they sell and support grow more complex. In the first six weeks after launching the gamification module, T-Mobile saw user participation in T-Community increase 1,000%.
In T-Mobile's customer service call centers and company-owned stores, employees fielding questions from subscribers find the answers by collaborating with their peers and searching for knowledge base articles in T-Community, the company's social business environment built on Jive.
T-Mobile implemented the Jive Advanced Gamification Module powered by Bunchball Nitro to engage users and motivate them to explore and familiarize themselves with a redesigned T-Community experience. Using gamification elements that are seamlessly integrated into the T-Community user environment, employees can now earn status and rewards for using T-Community, posting and answering questions, and liking content, and competitive elements allow them to monitor and compare their progress with that of their peers.
Within the first two weeks, more than 15,000 frontline employees completed an array of Getting Started missions -- far better than historical adoption rates for self-guided tutorials.
Employees were so active and quick to adopt the new platform that T-Mobile awarded 187,000 achievement badges in the first six weeks.
The number of "likes" assigned by employees to indicate a helpful response increased a staggering 6,000%.
Most importantly, resolution rates and customer satisfaction scores have improved each month since implementing gamification.
Krissy Espindola, director, knowledge management and social customer support, T-Mobile, said in a press release that even in a disruptive environment “where our frontline teams have to answer specific and often very difficult questions, they grasped the new platform and never missed a beat. We're excited because customers in the store get their problems resolved on the spot, and customers on the phone get the answers they need on the first call."
Gamification, Espindola added, endorses that kind of participation by rewarding users when they search for answers to their questions, rather than simply posting yet another question about a topic that was covered in detail a few days or weeks earlier.
"We believe peer-to-peer communication and collaboration pushes T-Community to a new level," she said, "and gamification is helping us move it there."