HSN steps up its game to engage remote employees

It’s hard to drive camaraderie among a highly dispersed workforce — but HSN has found a way.



The entertainment and lifestyle retailer reaches 94 million households through 1,700 sales and service agents —most of which remotely work from home. Such a widely dispersed workforce makes it difficult to use conventional tactics to build healthy competitive spirit and camaraderie in group settings. This challenge forced the company to step up its employee engagement game.



By deploying the gamification module within the Nice Performance Management solution from Nice Americas, HSN can now measure customer agent performance, drive healthy competition and highlight agents’ achievements. More importantly, the solution is now part of HSN's agent culture from the first day on the job and throughout the agent’s tenure.



When new employees are onboarded, they receive an HSN virtual passport which introduces the gamification concept, complete with easily-attained goals, such as a first upsell. Steadily, the program introduces more challenging targets.



Using insights provided by detailed tracking and reporting of the workforce, HSN rolled out a balanced score rating for each agent, with consistent, team- and role-based goals. This gives agents an at-a-glance understanding of how they are performing, and what tangible changes are needed to move them up into an “exceeds expectations” ranking.



“We are very committed to employee engagement and gamification, through NICE Performance Management, which fits perfectly into the ideas we want to reinforce with our agents,” said Julia Schmitz, manager of customer care operations, HSN. “Gamification has made it easier for us to communicate our company values and engage with all of our agents, even those who are sitting at home in their pajamas.”