The call center can be a high-pressure environment, particularly for sales-focused agents, so it’s essential that your training approach is both effective and engaging. By including games in your call center training strategy, you can develop key skills and improve performance while also giving your agents a chance to have some fun and form stronger workplace connections.
The primary goal in any call center is providing the best possible customer service, but increasingly, leaders want their agents to contribute to the sales function of the organization as well. If agents are expected to engage in upselling and cross-selling, they need to be capable of closing sales without sacrificing CX.
Call center sales games are a creative, inexpensive way to drive engagement, develop key skills, and encourage team bonding, contributing to happier agents and long-term growth for your organization.
Furthermore, with 65 percent of workers citing employer-provided upskilling as an important factor when evaluating a new position, the benefits of an innovative training program can reach beyond your current team.
To get the greatest benefit from training, agents need to be engaged in the process. Working in a call center can be challenging, with high expectations from customers and management, so it’s important to give agents a break from their day-to-day routine.
With research finding that 65 percent of the U.S. workforce is not engaged, anything you can do to keep agents invested in their work is valuable. Giving out small awards for the winners of the sales training games can encourage healthy competition and further pique the interest of your agents.
Using games as part of your contact center sales training process is an effective way to increase productivity and boost KPIs like conversion rate, average order size, and revenue per call.
With sales training games based around role-play and product knowledge, you can target the metrics that matter most to your business, empowering agents to achieve them. The improved morale and engagement resulting from these games can also contribute to increased productivity across the team.
While CX always remains the first priority for customer service agents, encouraging a more sales-focused mindset can help your organization diversify its revenue streams and identify new growth opportunities.
When implemented effectively, sales training games can help agents to upsell and cross-sell while also improving traditional call center metrics like CSAT and NPS. Additionally, the training can facilitate stronger alignment between the sales and service departments, helping to increase company-wide close rates.
93 percent of organizations are concerned about employee retention—and 94 percent of employees say they would stay in a job longer if their company was invested in their career development. Looking at these statistics side by side, it’s clear that investing in agent training can help employers tackle one of their biggest concerns.
Offering your agents sales-focused training will give them a chance to diversify their skill sets and further advance their careers in the future.
Training games aren’t only useful for developing individual skill sets; they serve as excellent opportunities for team building. With many of the games we recommend below relying on teamwork and cooperation, your agents will have a chance to learn from one another and develop better workplace relationships.
The healthy competition and sense of achievement involved in these games can also contribute to a more positive company culture.
From a twist on a classic quiz show to customer service role play, we’ve put together a list of the seven most effective call center sales games you can include in your training strategy.
It’s all about positive thinking. Bring your agents together, ask them to come up with outlandish requests, and get them to find a solution without saying no. The requests don’t necessarily have to be related to your company or product; it’s more of a mindset exercise.
When agents aren’t allowed to say no, they’re forced to come up with a positive solution. This is a very effective exercise for developing communication and problem-solving skills, identifying opportunities for upselling or cross-selling, and understanding how to say yes without promising too much.
Sometimes agents are going to encounter difficult customers. It’s an inevitable aspect of the job. This role-playing game will equip your team with the skills to handle these tough interactions. One agent plays the role of a difficult customer, while another is tasked with persuading that customer to take a predefined sales action.
The predefined nature of the exercise is important, as it enables you to target specific skills and tailor your training based on your goals. For example, you could prohibit the agent from offering a refund as a solution. This game improves soft skills like empathy, conflict resolution, and logical thinking.
Cold calls can be a real test for salespeople, so preparing your agents for these interactions is essential. In this game, you will assign point values to typical cold call events, like identifying a pain point or a price objection, and have one agent take a cold call while others listen in. The aim is to accumulate as many points as possible while still remaining professional and delivering a positive interaction.
The live nature of the game adds excitement, while the scoring list focuses agent attention on key techniques for handling cold calls. This one is great for teams, as it breaks up the monotony of the task and encourages healthy competition.
Ensuring that your employees fully understand your company’s product or service is one of your key responsibilities as a leader, with consumers ranking this knowledge as one of their most highly-valued qualities in an agent.
Write down a list of the products, services, and features that your company offers and then create one-line descriptions of potential customers and their needs. The aim of the game is to match these customers to the product/service/feature most relevant to their needs.
This game is especially beneficial for newer agents as they learn to upsell and cross-sell. At the same time, it’s valuable for everyone as a tool to improve organizational knowledge and critical thinking.
This sales game is all about quick thinking and creative solutions. Each agent is assigned a character and instructed to keep their identity a secret. Then, in character, they must attempt to sell your company’s products or services while other agents try to guess their identity.
By assigning these different personas to different people, you can push your agents out of their comfort zones and get them to look at the sales process from a new perspective. This requires improvisation, encouraging agents to find new, creative ways to sell your product or service.
Putting your own twist on the classic quiz show Jeopardy is a fun, effective way to train your staff. Put together a series of questions related to any area you want to focus on—product knowledge, customer service scenarios, sales techniques, etc.—and then divide your agents up into teams to add an extra competitive edge. Teams gain points for correct answers and, to raise the stakes, lose points for wrong answers.
The question categories can be anything you want, so you can tailor the game to support your business goals and improve performance in areas that are lacking.
This game brings together some of the most important sales skills—effective communication, strong product knowledge, and the ability to clearly demonstrate your value proposition—in one tight training exercise. Agents are divided into teams and given a specific product, service, or feature they must sell. Each team then delivers their pitch, and whichever pitch is most persuasive is declared the winner.
In addition to the sales skills noted earlier, the best pitch format encourages healthy competition and forces agents to develop a deep understanding of what they are selling.
Call center agents are the main customer-facing element of many companies, so it makes sense that businesses are keen to use this agent-customer relationship to drive sales.
To ensure that your agents are capable of fulfilling the service/sales hybrid role, you need to provide them with the right training. Sales training games are a fun, effective way to upskill agents while also driving engagement and boosting morale.
With Scorebuddy, you can use scorecards to identify skill and knowledge gaps within your organization and then design your training approach based on this information. To see what else Scorebuddy can do to enhance your agent training, request your free 14-day trial now.
