Financial Services and Gamification: Train, Motivate and Retain

Banking and other financial services firms are continually challenged to train, motivate and retain employees in order to deliver consistent, high performance services and build consumer trust. In-depth product knowledge, regulatory compliance, issue resolution, ethics and soft skills acumen are essential to engaging consumers with confidence. To address these challenges, many financial services firms are turning to Gamification.

From onboarding and product launches to regulatory compliance and ongoing training and coaching, gamification makes learning new information fun and engaging. It also provides constant feedback to employees to motivate them to continually improve performance and better serve financial services consumers. Gamification helps increase employee engagement in the financial services industry by building employee knowledge, and motivating and engaging employees to elevate their productivity, build loyalty and increase revenue.

Gamification can be used by banks, lenders, and other financial institutions to:

1. Align employee behaviors with business objectives.

2. Convey complex information and procedures in a simple way.

3. Improve employee performance and productivity– sales, marketing, customer service, product development.

4. Boost motivation, engagement and overall job satisfaction.

It’s no surprise that happy employees are more motivated to perform better and are more productive. They also tend to stay with the company they work for longer. Gamification makes work more enjoyable and improves employee engagement in financial services teams.

According to a range of research on gamification:

• Employees are 90% more productive when they use gamification
• Gamification raises employee engagement by 48%
• 95% of employees enjoy using gamification
• 72% of employees believe they are inspired to work harder with gamification

Gamification benefits more than just the contact center

We know that Gamification can have tremendous advantages for the contact center. Gamification also works beyond just the contact center to make training more interactive and to increase employee engagement in financial services enterprises. It can help employees across the company develop in-depth knowledge of new products and updates. Gamification tracks participation and progress to ensure that employees are completing required training. It also reinforces policies and adherence to compliance and industry standards. In addition, it streamlines onboarding by training employees in corporate values, safety, product lines and branding. Here are some ways that employees outside of the contact center can benefit from Gamification:

Sales

Financial services sales, similar to sales in other industries, is a process. Gamification can accelerate onboarding, high performance and goal attainment.

Firms can gamify onboarding activities like filling out documents, attending security or ethics training, and demonstrating aptitude and usage of sales tools such as CRM, which is essential to accurate forecasting and sales assessment. Ongoing training with Gamification is also important for sustained performance. Research indicates that continuous training can produce 50% higher net sales and sustainable growth.

Some of the sales KPIs that financial services firms gamify include number of leads, number of transfers, dials per hour, contacts per hour, sales and revenue per hour, to name a few.

Marketing

Marketing’s contribution to company success is dependent on a deep coordination and collaboration with sales, customer service and other functional groups. A recent Forbes CMO Practice Report cites three main business outcomes that can be attributed to marketing – brand awareness, customer engagement and demand generation.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) that coincide with each outcome can be gamified. Here are a few of the specific KPIs that are tied to meeting corporate goals and objectives:

• Brand Awareness: Social followers, retweets; Brand preference; Media impressions
• Customer Engagement: Engagement on sales & service calls; Campaign opens & response rates; Event & webinar registrations
• Demand Generation: Qualified leads; Product demos; Calls & inquiries; Sales meets

For the full list of marketing KPIs that can be gamified, download the ebook, Financial Services and Gamification: Building Trust and Revenue.

Once the KPIs are determined, specific goals for each must be defined. In addition to keeping marketers focused on the right activities, gamification keeps track of where each user is against their individual and group goals.

Product development

Gamification can help firms build more enthusiastic and customer-driven development teams that keep employees more satisfied and demonstrate excellence in product development. Encouraging friendly competition, collaboration and knowledge-sharing is essential to achieving product goals and objectives and delivering quality new products, value-adds and innovative upgrades on time.

Common developer KPIs that can be gamified include: code quality, on-time delivery, requirement management, knowledge management, defects fixed before general release, and length of time for bug fixes prior to and after release.