How ARA Diagnostics incentivized employee performance

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The organization

ARA Diagnostic Imaging has been providing quality imaging services to the people of Austin and Central Texas since 1954. ARA has over 115 radiologists with multiple subspecialties and 17 outpatient imaging centers including specialized diagnostic imaging centers including women’s imaging centers and a children’s imaging center. Their contact center, of which 96% of employees work remotely, schedules appointments using inbound, outbound and omnichannel solutions.

Motivation for change

An ARA employee's effectiveness is measured across the spectrum of efficiency and service level KPIs. ARA has a long history of leveraging the power of rewards and incentives to impact those agent performance KPIs; however, they were having difficulty scaling and measuring the ROI of those rewards. ARA’s existing gamification system required exhaustive manual calculations for quarterly results, reward timing was too far removed from the action to be meaningful to agents and manual fulfillment was inefficient. ARA was losing more than 80 management hours quarterly in order to properly track, communicate, fulfill and calculate agent incentives.

ARA was looking for a way to better incentivize employees in a timely manner with a more automated, less manual process. Additionally, they wanted a solution to better engage employees and reduce absenteeism. In fact, research from Gallup show engaged employees have a 37% lower rate of absence.

Why Aspect

Aspect League is designed to increase productivity and reduce employee turnover across all generations – from Boomers and Millennials to the fast-growing Gen-Z workforce. Whether employees are motivated most by incentives or recognition, competition or collaboration, Aspect League transforms daily routines into rewarding rivalries that give everyone a reason to do their best.

Aspect League offers five pillars:

• Gamification: incentivize employees with recognition, awards, score cards, leveling up and the ability to have competitions and engagement

• Coaching: engage supervisors with the information they need to coach their team, see immediate impacts and reward them for a job well done

• GLMS: easily upload content for gamified learning, surveys and quizzes

• Easy Rewards: Turn spendable points into real world gift cards that are meaningful to your employees with 100’s to choose from, all on the same platform

• Mobile App: Access the dashboard, friends’ profiles, leaderboards, awards, competitions and redeem points from anywhere

The solution

The Aspect solution targeted persistent performance change by incorporating dynamic reward and redemption game construction. However, the Aspect team also went further. In collaboration with the ARA Team, Aspect isolated employee, supervisor, and manager focus on performance goals by unifying engagement, launching robust gamification and focusing on accelerating aptitude with skill development. ARA’s management made the astute decision to identify an internal Game Master who was their “ROI Caretaker.”

The Game Master easily tracked progress toward company goals through scorecards. When progress was not trending toward goal success, they leveraged the optimal game mechanic on the right employee or groups at the right time. ARA also utilized the robust collection of redemption features within Aspect League. Raffles, auctions and the Aspect League platform’s Bling Bazaar were leveraged, lining up to what their employees valued to ensure maximum emotional engagement. And built-in randomness was employed, ensuring rewards were distributed fairly. ARA also doubled down on highlighting individual and group achievement. Utilizing peer recognition to highlight performance improvement was used a catalyst for achievement, targeting the middle 60% of their team.

“Aspect League has been fantastic in increasing our ability to recognize and reach employees that should be rewarded for meeting goals and increasing performance.” -Alan Lai, Workforce Analytics Manager, ARA Diagnostic Imaging

The Results

The results were profound: Aspect League helped ARA achieve a 33% decrease in after-call work, a 25% decrease in customer hold times, a 5% increase in active working percentage, a 5% increase in calls per day and $1,000 a day in efficiency savings. In addition, after deploying Aspect League absenteeism dropped from 25% to 10%, resulting in a savings of $67,500.

Reimagine your workforce experience