Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Gamifying Agent Performance: How ZIZO Uses Behavioral Science to Cut Attrition & Boost Productivity
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Good afternoon, everybody. We are chatting today with Jill Fetcher, the Director of Sales and Marketing at Zizzle about Gamified Performance Enablement. Jill, welcome to the podcast. It's great to see you again. Jill Fecher: It's great to see you. Thanks for having me. Gina Gibson: Absolutely, let's start with the basics. Jill, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? And I always like to ask what's one thing about you that's maybe not on LinkedIn, just to let our viewers get to know you a little bit better. Jill Fecher: Well, I love that. So I have a 20 plus year career in sales and marketing. started at Sizzle a little over a year ago and I've loved getting into this space of call center technology. So that's exciting to me. And thing that people may not know about me is that I love to tap dance. So I'm an adult tap dancer ⁓ with Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. That's awesome. Jill Fecher: I take classes at a studio that I went to growing up and about five years ago they created an alumni class and so once a week I get together with or so of my friends that are in their ⁓ that we all just like to tap together. ⁓ Gina Gibson: That's fantastic. What a great to have. I love it. Do you want to give us your elevator pitch for Zizonjil? Jill Fecher: I would love to. So Zizzo is a performance management tool for call centers that we use behavioral science and gamification to engage your center agents, to get them working harder, more productive, and most importantly, decrease We know that that's one of the biggest problems in the call center space today and with all frontline workers is getting people want to work and getting them staying at your company. So ⁓ we are attrition buster. and we turn those disengaged teams into motivated goal-crushing powerhouses. Gina Gibson: I love it. What makes your platform different than your competitors? What makes you stand out? Jill Fecher: And so lot of people think about gamification as just ⁓ you can add a leaderboard to, right? Or anything you can earn points. And of course we have those features, but what makes us different is we're really driven by human behavioral science. So we've studied what people, what types of things in a platform could get them ⁓ more what gets them more engaged and how going to work. So every feature and solution that you see ⁓ is really by outside science. in scientific studies. Gina Gibson: And how is changing the behavior of agents today? Like, how are you seeing, ⁓ you seeing that as any impact today? Jill Fecher: So there's a lot of tools out there that use AI that can change the way that they work, become more efficient, smarter with it. But I think like we've seen with all sorts of tools, the experience is just getting, you have to keep their attention. So everyone's attention span is shorter. They want quicker. They want to able to do their job easier. so AI is changing and giving people all sorts solutions that help them. One of the things that people are a little bit afraid about with AI is just getting the wrong answers or being non-compliant. Our solution doesn't do any of things, but we do use AI to give managers coaching insights ⁓ to help them faster and easier, spend a lot less time running reports, analyzing them. platform gives ways to say, Gina's struggling today with X, Y, and Z. Why don't you go over to her and talk to her about this? Give her this advice. Help her do this. And it just bubbles up those insights to make it really easy for managers to scale. Gina Gibson: I love that. And I'm sure one of the other answers that, you know, the your people that are use your product want to know about is the ROI, right? Like how do you measure the ROI on your platform for both the employee engagement side as well as business outcomes? Jill Fecher: Sure, so it's a really easy formula that we use. So our value is decreasing attrition, increasing productivity, and that's where the ROI comes in, minus the cost of ZISO. So what we do with any prospect that we're talking to is first determine the cost of their problem. So a typical call center will come to me and say, we're hiring 25 people every month. 23 show up on day one. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Jill Fecher: By the end of the week, maybe we have 18. By the end of week two, we have 12. And we're lucky if by the end of a 30-day training program, if we still have three to five people left. And we're lucky at the end of 90 days if we have one of those people left. And we do it again and again and again every month. And so we talk to them and say, well, what's the cost of that? What's the cost of those hires for 30 days that never make it to the call center floor because they're in training or they're shadowing in that program. Typically we find that the average cost is anywhere between $4,000 up to $10,000 or $15,000 especially for call centers that have highly regulated environments where they need background checks, more extensive training, those types of things. So what we do is we say, okay, you're losing 20 agents within that first month. That is 20 times $5,000. That's a $100,000 problem every month. reduce that in half, saving you $50,000 and our solution is a fraction of that price. So ⁓ able to show our clients within 30, 60, 90 days of using our platform ⁓ they're getting a percent ROI even within that first month. Another way that we look at it from a business outcomes is productivity. So one of the industries that we with in the call center quite a bit is collections ⁓ and that's a really one because it's revenue. new generated. So if they're bringing in $10,000 a month in collections on average and we're able to increase their productivity just by you know 10%, you can easily do that math by how many agents that they do to see from a productivity improvement standpoint how much more money we're bringing in. And we're able to see on average that we're increasing profitability by at least 25 % for each of our clients. Gina Gibson: That's incredible. You mentioned collections Jill, is there any other verticals that you shine in or is there any that you know this is where like sales, collections we do really well in? Are there any verticals you don't play in? Jill Fecher: pretty industry agnostic, but would say that our three are really ⁓ a large so 10 more agents all doing the same every day ⁓ and having those repetitive and KPIs that we can measure. So whether they're in customer service, phone sales, collections, any of ⁓ work great for us. ⁓ Gina Gibson: That's fantastic. you want to talk a little bit about one of your success stories and maybe any of your unique features that Zizzo has that your customers kind of constantly rave about? Jill Fecher: Sure, sure. So we look to reward recognize the employees every single day with what they're doing. ⁓ one of the unique things about us is that we make contests and gamification objective fair and inclusive for the whole team. So ⁓ a of call centers will say, ⁓ I already run contests. I don't need a platform to do that for me. ⁓ But we typically see is that people will run contest and say, my top salesperson this month is going to get tickets to this NFL game ⁓ our top salesperson is going to get this TV and goes across for customer service maybe the top customer you survey scores that got whatever that is and what ends up happening is the top three to five people ⁓ every single month and actually demotivates 90 of your staff because they're thinking well I just started there's no way I can compete with Gina she's a rock star and so we give a lot mechanisms that that allow you to use micro rewards and every day ⁓ motivate everyone across a of KPIs, not just the end result. We want to measure ⁓ behavioral where you're saying time and attendance. Are they showing up? Are they working their hours? Are they being compliant? Effort-based KPIs. they making the outbound calls that we want them to? ⁓ Are they when they're supposed be? And then the skill-based KPIs ⁓ come with that. when you're putting in the effort, you're doing the behaviors that we want, we know you're building those skills to get the results. And so we're rewarding them all along that journey giving everyone opportunities to win every day, week, month, so that the top still always end up getting rewarded the most. Your bottom performers ⁓ earn the of the rewards, but that everyone has a chance to win and be recognized. So that's something really unique and that our really love. So they see that and they get excited about it. Another thing that one of our more recent clients that just joined a few months ago, ⁓ they found success in is that we have a way for agents challenge each other. So they'll use that feature quite a bit. And they found that that has really built not just the business outcomes that they're looking for, but this culture of camaraderie and teamwork, and ⁓ kind this competition. And so they'll say, hey, Gina, I bet I can do, I bet I can collect more than you this week. And they'll bet each other. And so that makes it a lot more fun. It's not just driven from the top down, but from peer to peer as well. Gina Gibson: And is that, that's kind of a way maybe you guys hadn't thought of as far as a motivator and the customer, the client thought of that on their own. Jill Fecher: Yeah, well, and we had it as a feature, but just certain cultures gravitate to that more than others. And so we didn't think that was going to be the top thing that they love, but they love it because it also takes a little bit of heat off the managers because the agents are challenging each other. ⁓ Gina Gibson: Absolutely. do you see the future of gamification evolving, Jill, in the workplace? And you know, we're hybrid, we're remote, we're back in the office, it's a combination of everything. How do you see the future kind of playing out? Jill Fecher: So I think that there's a lot of opportunities for many different types of customers to do this or many different types of companies, sorry. ⁓ is starting to be gamified. And it's of those things where people will look at it go, ⁓ that seems fun for the younger generation. And really, think it speaks to all generations. And that's why we talk about being science-based and ⁓ working in science, because we've studied that across every generation, age group. No one's exempt from human behavior. So as it evolves, see more and more things being gamified and getting customers involved as opposed to just employees. One of the examples that I like to use when people say, oh, this is only for those younger generations is the Peloton. So there's been stationary bikes for decades and they cost a couple hundred bucks. And during the pandemic, everyone our age got hooked on the Peloton because they Gina Gibson: Yes. Yep. Jill Fecher: they added a leaderboard and they started spending thousands of dollars for the same stationary bike you could have bought for $200 10 years ago. So that's just one example where it's not just young people getting engaged. People like to be rewarded. They like to be recognized in whatever way that ends up happening. Gina Gibson: love that example and it's so true and I am guilty of being like those people that bought the Peloton during COVID. ⁓ Just we wrap up, Jill, is there anything else you'd like our ⁓ listeners know or learn about Zizzo before we... Jill Fecher: Exactly right. So I think what people should know, as I've said, it's very science driven. We've studied this extensively and not just from our own results, but from outside sources of motivates and engages people. ⁓ And so just think of it as, don't know if I like gamification. I don't know if people would like this that would stick with us. What you need think of is your call center focused on improving your attrition rates. ⁓ Do you have turnover? example, resonate with you where you're hiring every single month churning those people out and just trying, trying, trying everything you can think of to get them to stick around. ⁓ we have great results, and pays for itself within a month. And so, you know, whole year's investment will pay for itself in a month in attrition. ⁓ you know, of in terms of your problem. And that's what we're here to solve. Gina Gibson: I love it. And Jill, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. So to end the podcast, we do some rapid fire. ⁓ What is your favorite word? Jill Fecher: Love it. Ooh, favorite word. ⁓ I love ⁓ words. They kind of relate to each other, but I love the word serendipity and love the word coincidence because they're kind of the same thing like little happy surprises. It always delights me when I find things in common with people or times our paths would have crossed and it just gives a little excitement every day. Gina Gibson: What is your least favorite word? Jill Fecher: Okay. not necessarily the word itself, but I think something that is overused and that I hear all the time is when people say, I'm so busy. I'm so busy. I'm so busy. I'm too busy. And it's like a race to see who's the busiest person. whenever I say something like, ⁓ I'm really busy that day. I'm always like, no, chill. Like you hate when other people say that, ⁓ everyone ⁓ just this culture of busyness that we have. And so, you as AI tools come in and, and can help you do your work as you can prioritize and have that mental work-life balance. just always want to cure everyone's busyness. ⁓ Gina Gibson: I love it. I love it. What excites you the most? ⁓ Jill Fecher: am a huge reader and read and I love start a new book. And I love when a book shocks me. Like if I laugh out loud ⁓ or I cry I'm like, I didn't think that was going to happen. It just that I love that. I love and I books. ⁓ Gina Gibson: Wonderful. if somebody wants more information, Jill, about using Zizzo, who should they call? Jill Fecher: So you can call Gina and she can help you connect to me or you can call me directly, jillfetcher at SISO and my email is jill at siso.ai. So easy to remember. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Perfect. A big thank you, Jill, for joining us today and sharing your insights. It was a pleasure spending time with you. Thanks so much. Jill Fecher: Thank you. This has been great.