REDWOOD CITY, CA — (Marketwired) — 08/22/13 — , the pioneer and market leader in gamification, today announced that its acclaimed gamification technology is powering a nationwide effort by 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. In the process, 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 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 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 enable them to monitor and compare their progress with that of their peers.
In its first six weeks after launching the gamification module, T-Mobile saw user participation in T-Community increase 1,000 percent. And that-s not all:
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 percent.
Most importantly, resolution rates and customer satisfaction scores have improved each month since implementing gamification.
“There-s no other way to say it: this effort has taken off like wildfire, and Bunchball-s gamification technology has encouraged that success,” said Krissy Espindola, director, knowledge management and social customer support, T-Mobile. “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.”
With more than 45 million customers, T-Mobile has plenty of reasons to deliver exceptional customer service. In fact, mobile consumers overwhelmingly base their satisfaction on the quality of the customer service they receive — and especially on the knowledge of service personnel and on their ability to resolve issues quickly, according to . Yet the job of those representatives has never been tougher, with rapidly evolving mobile devices — all of them different — proliferating at a daunting rate.
“We launch between 30 and 40 devices a year,” said Espindola, whose staff creates support threads involving up to 800 individual steps for every mobile device T-Mobile carries. “Each of those devices goes through three to five updates that completely change its functionality. This isn-t a problem you can solve by throwing staff at it.”
To remain ahead of the technology curve, Espindola is turning to the very people who interact with customers every day. “We-re using gamification to specifically motivate members to solve problems and collaborate on a peer-to-peer basis,” she said. “While we still maintain a close moderating presence to encourage and ensure best practices and proper usage of the tools, we-ve seen support costs decrease. The community also self-governs well, making it more resonant and valuable to its members.”
Gamification, says Espindola, 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.”
“Anyone looking for evidence that gamification delivers real-world business benefits has real-world proof in the amazing results that T-Mobile has achieved with its T-Community,” said Rajat Paharia, founder and chief product officer of Bunchball and author of the new best-selling book, . “T-Mobile can measure the impact of gamification in terms that any business can understand: lower support costs, faster resolution times, improved customer satisfaction, and sustained engagement. We-re delighted to work with T-Mobile and Jive to unleash the motivational power of gamification in ways that create a better way of working and collaborating for 30,000 employees.”
The Jive Advanced Gamification Module powered by Bunchball Nitro delivers gamification mechanics throughout the Jive environment which empower organizations to create motivational experiences that keep users connected, collaborating and participating. The gamification module uses proven motivational techniques that trigger a person-s innate desire for progress, recognition, competition and community — and in doing so, they motivate people to work smarter, share more and collaborate better. Jive customers can deploy the module to deliver a personalized, highly targeted experience that builds sustained engagement and lasting loyalty among customers, employees and partners.
Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Bunchball enables organizations to improve business performance throughout their ecosystem by creating highly active and loyal customers, employees, and partners. Bunchball-s comprehensive suite of innovative cloud-based solutions empowers companies to engage and motivate, leading to improved employee productivity, customer loyalty, audience engagement, and ROI. Bunchball-s world-class customers include Adobe, HP, Cisco, MTV, Comcast, LiveOps, VMware and Hasbro. Based in Silicon Valley, Bunchball-s investors include Granite Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Northport Investments, and Correlation Ventures. For more information, visit , our blog at , or follow .
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