Call Center Employee Incentives

Keeping employees happy, engaged, and motivated has always been challenging in any workplace. Call centers are no exception. And we all know that there’s a lot of stress involved in call center jobs. Agents often have to handle high call volumes while being pressured to hit their performance targets and maintain high FCR rates – all while delivering outstanding customer service experiences. Not to mention having to deal with frustrated customers on a regular basis. That may negatively impact morale, motivation, job satisfaction, engagement, and retention.

Luckily, implementing a solid call center employee recognition program and offering your reps meaningful incentives can significantly improve engagement, boost motivation and performance, and help you reduce agent turnover. But what do those incentives look like? Based on our 15-year experience in the call center industry, we’ve collected some of the most impactful call center incentive ideas that will motivate your team and won’t cost a fortune to implement. Read on to explore them in more detail.

How Essential are Call Center Employee Incentives in the Workplace?

The call center industry is known for its high employee turnover rates – significantly higher than in many other sectors. In fact, while the industry standard for call center turnover is around 30-40%, some call centers have agent turnover as high as over 200%, according to research by SQM Group. Though several factors come into play when it comes to retaining call center employees, recognition through incentives and rewards is definitely among the top drivers of employee retention in contact centers.

Knowing your team is doing an excellent job isn’t enough. You need to tell your call center employees that you know it and appreciate it – and, more importantly, show your appreciation through meaningful incentives and rewards. Research shows that employees want to be rewarded for their efforts. The 2023 Employee Engagement Trends Report by Reward Gateway found that 60% of US employees want their employer to increase their investment in employee reward and recognition.

Benefits of Providing Call Center Incentives

Let’s take a closer look at the specific benefits you can reap from simply investing more in call center agent incentives and recognition initiatives.

✓ Increased engagement and job satisfaction

While it’s only one piece of the puzzle, recognizing and rewarding employees for their outstanding achievements or day-to-day input and providing them with customized incentives can significantly increase employee engagement and job satisfaction. And we all know that engaged employees are an asset to any organization. Based on Gallup research, employees who receive great recognition are 20 times as likely to be engaged as employees who receive poor recognition.

✓ Improved morale and motivation

Repetitive tasks, working in noisy environments, abusive customer behavior, and having to maintain consistent service levels are just a few challenges call center reps face daily. It all can negatively impact employee morale and motivation. By implementing a comprehensive rewards and incentive program, you can effectively motivate agents to meet their performance targets and KPIs, reduce absenteeism, and improve morale despite the challenges of the job.

✓ Better performance and productivity

What gets recognized gets repeated. By recognizing and rewarding your top-performing employees, you are encouraging excellent performance and motivating your reps to be even more productive. And what’s more, beyond communicating appreciation to the recognized employee, the act of recognition also sends the message to other team members about what success looks like and creates a culture of healthy competition within your call center.

✓ Reduced turnover and improved retention

We’ve already mentioned the alarming employee turnover rates in the call center industry. Investing in recognition and incentives can help you increase job satisfaction, improve employee retention, and ultimately reduce your turnover rates. And considering that statistically, it may cost you over $20,000 to replace an average-performing call center agent, it can also help you reduce operational costs associated with hiring and training newly-hired reps.

✓ Better customer service 

Lastly, incentives encourage employees to go above and beyond in each customer interaction and deliver memorable customer service experiences – and that can improve customer satisfaction and positively impact your bottom line. Considering that 58% of customers are willing to pay more for better customer service, according to a survey from Shep Hyken, it’s a worthwhile investment for your call center.

Call Center Incentive Ideas to Implement in Your Call Center

The following list might give you some employee recognition ideas to help you make your team members feel recognized, valued, and appreciated:

Performance-based monetary incentives

Money is a universal language everyone understands. Although that might seem too obvious to mention, monetary incentives are incredibly important in the call center environment. While the average salary for a call center agent may dramatically vary based on the country – in most cases, these are not high-paying jobs. Offering financial incentives to your reps can directly impact your employees’ financial well-being – and it always serves as a powerful motivator. Financial bonuses can be set up on different intervals (monthly or quarterly) and can be tied to various performance metrics, such as CSAT scores for customer-facing reps or conversion rates for sales-oriented agents.

Extra paid time off

Time is the only thing people value as much (or maybe even more) than money. That’s why, besides giving monetary incentives to your top-performing agents, providing extra paid time off is always a good idea. Again, call center jobs are stressful, and agents often experience burnout, negatively impacting their performance, engagement, and motivation. Did you know that 87% of employees experience high or very high stress levels at their call centers, according to a Cornell University study? Giving your reps an opportunity to spend an extra day with family or friends as a way to recognize their achievements is a worthy incentive to offer.

Point-based rewards

Implementing a point-based reward system is one of the most common ways to reward employees. With a point-based reward system, employees accumulate points over a period and redeem them for different pre-decided benefits such as gift cards, swag, merchandise, travel destinations, charitable donations, and much more. It gives your reps control over the recognition experience by letting them choose rewards they actually want (instead of receiving just another generic mug with the company logo) and when they want.

Flexible scheduling and WFH options

Incentives can be as simple as giving your agents the opportunity to select or at least influence their scheduling and allowing them to work remotely. Gallup found that nearly two-thirds of U.S. workers who have been working remotely during the pandemic would like to continue to do so. And according to research from Invoca, 68% of call center agents prefer a hybrid environment, while 44% prefer working remotely full-time. Giving agents the flexibility to influence their schedules and work from home helps them maintain a better work-life balance and increases job satisfaction.

Employee of the month

The employee of the month award is a common practice in call centers – and it can be an incredible morale booster for your team. Based on the size of your team, you can either highlight one agent per month or you might want to select more than one or break it up by department or job title. When implementing the employee of the month award, get very specific about how the winner is going to be selected and make sure everyone on your team understands the eligibility criteria and how the selection process will work. Here are some ideas on how you can reward the employee of the month:

• Digital wall of fame: create a digital wall of fame where each employee of the month is featured, along with a mini bio and shout-outs from other team members.
• A personalized trophy: give the employee of the month a personalized trophy that they can display at their desk or take home.
• Company-wide recognition: feature the employee of the month in the company newsletter, on social media, or give a shout-out during team meetings.
• Lunch with leadership: arrange a lunch with the company’s leadership, giving the employee of the month an opportunity to discuss their career growth.
• Experience-based reward: pay for an experience, such as a movie night, dinner for two, local sports event, concert, hotel stay, etc.

Professional development opportunities

You can also reward your top-performing agents by providing them with professional development opportunities, such as training programs, workshops, and courses, or giving them a chance to attend an industry conference, where they can learn from the leaders and industry experts. Not only is it beneficial to their professional development, but it can also help you reduce turnover and improve retention. According to LinkedIn Learning’s Workplace Learning Report, 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development.

Wellness incentives

Based on research by Calabrio, as many as 96% of contact center agents report feeling acutely stressed at least once per week, while 44% of agents report that their biggest challenge is an overwhelming number of calls they have to handle. Once again, it proves that working in a call center environment can be extremely demanding – mentally, emotionally, and even physically, putting your call center reps on a fast path to burnout. That’s why wellness-based incentives are actually some of the most valuable call center incentives you can offer to your reps. These could include anything that can help your reps maintain physical, mental, and emotional health, such as:

• Gym memberships
• Fitness and yoga classes
• Stress reduction workshops
• Meditation classes
• Massage certificates
• Spa gift certificates
• Mental health resources

Peer-to-peer recognition

Recognition from colleagues might be just as important as recognition from team leaders and managers. According to the 2024 State of Recognition report by Achievers, employees who receive low frequency manager recognition but at least monthly peer recognition are 38% more likely to report being productive at work. In addition, employees who receive recognition from peers at least once a month are twice as likely to feel a strong sense of belonging. Incorporating peer-to-peer recognition into your call center can help you establish a supportive company culture and build better engagement.

Best Practices for Implementing an Effective Employee Recognition Program

Leverage AI to enhance employee recognition

AI-driven solutions can enhance your employee recognition efforts in many ways. Firstly, you can leverage AI tools to track achievements in real time and provide instant recognition, which is critical to the success of your employee recognition strategy. Based on Gallup, 40% of employees report receiving recognition just a few times a year or less. Secondly, AI tools can help you ensure fairness and reduce bias when evaluating your agents’ performance.

For example, with the VoiceSpin AI solution, you can monitor 100% of your inbound and outbound calls in real time and automatically evaluate the quality of customer interactions and agent performance based on your own evaluation criteria. It makes it much easier and quicker for team leaders to identify top-performing agents and reward employee achievements as they are happening – not months later.

Align incentives with employee preferences

You can add more value to your employee recognition and incentives program by making sure the rewards and incentives you provide to your call center reps align with what they actually want. Conducting employee pulse surveys or simply asking your team members what kind of rewards and incentives are meaningful and relevant to them through one-on-one meetings will help you better understand their preferences. According to research from Blackhawk Network, in many cases, incentives employees would like to get from employers are not aligned with their employer’s offerings. Here are some more specific findings from the survey:

• 66% of employees want bonuses; 28% receive them
• 42% of employees would like time off work; 15% are granted it
• 41% of employees prefer prepaid or gift cards; 20% are awarded them
• 33% of employees want personalized cards or emails; 25% receive them

Incorporate gamification elements

Incorporating gamification elements into your employee recognition program is a great way to make it more fun and engaging for your reps, especially for the younger members of your team. Agents will surely feel more motivated to reach specific targets, complete certain tasks, or demonstrate desired behaviors when they know they can earn points that can be exchanged for meaningful rewards. And the benefits of adopting a gamification approach are enormous. Gamification improves engagement, enhances team collaboration and social interaction, fosters healthy competition, boosts morale, and increases productivity.

Wrapping up

Employees who don’t feel their efforts and contributions are noticed and valued are more likely to be disengaged, feel ignored, underperform, and eventually quit. Demonstrating appreciation and rewarding your call center agents with rewards and incentives that matter to them can make a big difference.

Recognition drives better engagement, inspires continuous excellence, fosters a sense of pride and belonging, and motivates your reps to go the extra mile in customer interactions. And as we’ve seen from some of the examples above – sometimes it doesn’t cost you anything other than the time and effort you put into it.

On top of that, tracking agent performance and recognizing your team’s achievements in a timely manner requires an effective call center reporting software solution. With VoiceSpin, you can create custom reports and track call center metrics and performance KPIs that are critical to you through real-time and historical reporting.

What’s even better, you can integrate an AI speech analytics software solution to automate and optimize agent performance evaluation and make this process more data-driven and efficient, building the foundation for creating an effective agent incentive program.

Book a demo call now to see VoiceSpin’s call center software solutions in action.