7 Engaging Call Center Contest Ideas for 2026

Why Are Contests Important in Call Center Work?

Let’s face it: call center work is rarely the most exciting or engaging. It’s easy to become frustrated while on the job, and the employee turnover rate from this career is no laughing matter.

This is why it’s absolutely vital that you’re able to make call center work as interesting and—dare we say—as fun for your agents as possible. And yes, it’s truly possible!

Gamification in call centers means applying traditional game components—points, contests, rewards, and live leaderboards—to the non-game work of your agents. If you can hack a gamification strategy for your office, you’ll boost retention rates, maximize employee performance and, most importantly, turn the chore of the job into fun.

Contests are a form of gamification with particular relevance to the contemporary call center. Contests tap into your call center agents’ competitive spirit and incentivize their work through the promise of reward.

Rewards can include a bottle of wine, gift cards to restaurants or the movies, special privileges at the office, or any other exciting prize you can think of. Add an extra dimension of competition by tracking your agents’ performance on live dashboards, so they can see their numbers—and feel the heat of their competition!—in real time.

With that out of the way, let’s delve into seven contest ideas to gamify your call center’s daily workflow.

What Makes a Good Call Center Contest or Game?

While there are many good ideas for call center contest ideas, they all share several key features:

• They encourage teamwork and teambuilding.
• They encourage professional and personal development.
• They allow employees to increase and hone their skill sets.
• They motivate participants extrinsically (with tangible rewards) and intrinsically (with feeling of personal accomplishment).
• They are positive and uniting, rather than negative and divisive.

Build your own

Run These Contests Automatically with Plecto

Every idea below runs on the same engine. Connect your phone system or CRM, pick the KPI the contest measures, set a prize and a deadline, and Plecto tracks it live: updating the leaderboard, firing notifications when someone takes the lead, and putting it all on an office TV. You get the motivation without the manual scorekeeping.

See Plecto's call center contests →

1. Customer Satisfaction Challenge

Agents can win big for improving customer well-being.

Who doesn’t love satisfied customers, especially as satisfied customers love you? Encouraging customer success is a surefire way to boost your own. Crucially, it’s also a key metric in ascertaining your agents’ performance.

In the Customer Satisfaction Challenge, use NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) to track agent performance and customer success over a set period. Agents with the highest customer satisfaction can win fun prizes such as gift cards, paid time off, or recognition from management (such as an “Employee of the Month” award).

Run it in Plecto: track CSAT and NPS live and let the leaderboard rank agents automatically with a call center contest.

Discover Plecto gamification

2. First Call Resolution (FCR) Contest

Agents are challenged to use their own skills to boost customer satisfaction with minimal outside help.

This one is all about keeping your Escalation Rate as low as possible. Being able to solve customer issues on the first call is a strong testament to both your agents’ prowess, and your customers’ potential to remain loyal and satisfied in the future.

To carry out this contest challenge, track the number of calls resolved without follow-ups. The first agent to reach a successful resolution sans follow-up, or the agent who accomplishes the most FCRs in a set period, can win a fun prize—a bonus, a free lunch, company merch, or a tech gadget.

Run it in Plecto: the leaderboard updates the moment a call resolves, so there's no tallying by hand. See how contests work.

3. Team Bingo

This contest tests a wide range of agent competences with an unpredictable chance element!

Bring the popular party favorite to your office with a call center-themed bingo challenge! This contest can be applicable to both individuals and teams. Create a large bingo card and fill it with different relevant accomplishments—for example, “handled a difficult customer,” “sold an upsell,” “received a compliment.”

Hang the card up in an easy-to-see location—and let your agents go at it! The first agent or team to fill a row wins a prize, and the first to fill the whole card wins an even larger prize—for example, a pizza party. The variety of tasks in Team Bingo promotes a well-rounded approach to sales, testing the numerous components that make up a successful sales agent.

Run it in Plecto: turn the bingo squares into achievements that unlock automatically as agents hit each task.

4. Speed and Accuracy Competition

This contest is guaranteed to get your agents’ adrenaline pumping when the need for speed kicks in.

A true test of agility and skill, a speed and accuracy competition will evaluate your agents on the basis of their all-around competence. Agents who manage to combine a high quality of calls alongside a fast response speed are truly the gold standard of call center service.

Track your agents over the course of a month with call metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHDT) and Quality Assurance (QA). The agent with the highest average of both scores over the time period wins—tickets to a local event or cinema, for example, and definitely some office-wide recognition!

Run it in Plecto: score Average Handle Time and QA side by side on a live call center dashboard.

5. Call Center Olympics

This DIY-Olympics is the perfect means to encourage teambuilding alongside individual growth.

Plecto customer If Forsikring—Scandinavia’s biggest insurance firm—actually created their own version of Call Center Olympics, when they adopted Plecto and needed to introduce it to their employees.

If’s contest consisted of agents drawn from different departments, all working together in five teams. When a sales agent won a sale or obtained additional information about a customer, the team would win five points, for example. The first team to cross the finish line of eight million (!) points won the Olympics—and free ice cream for the rest of the summer.

You too can adapt this Olympic contest to your own office. You can create multiple mini-competitions or award points for activities such as fastest call resolution, best customer feedback, and most calls answered per day.

Run the contest over a week or month, or until a team reaches a predetermined points goal. Encourage collaboration, competition, and teamwork by promising a fantastic prize to the winner…including but not limited to ice cream!

Run it in Plecto: award team points automatically and fire instant notifications at every milestone.

Create your own contest

6. Social Media Mentions

Winning free merch can be as simple as creating a single LinkedIn post.

While not directly related to your call center’s operations, a social media mentions contest allows your agents to engage with and promote your company’s latest news—whether that’s a new product launch, an exciting new initiative, or the work that other employees have been up to.

For example, at the Plecto head office in Aarhus, Denmark, the social media competition occurs on a monthly basis. Employees post Plecto-related content on social media—whether on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook—and individual scores are conveniently displayed on TVs around the office. At the end of the month, the employee who created the most posts wins a piece of fantastic Plecto merch.

7. Team vs. Team Contest

Bring sporting energy to your office with this tried-and-true classic.

Last but not least, a simple classic—Team vs. Team Contests. Similar to Call Center Olympics, this type of contest occurs only within the sales department. Divide your department into two or more teams, and see who can win the most sales over a given period.

Besides spurring on friendly competition, Team vs. Team contests will mix up usual friendships and day-to-day patterns, and will help ensure everyone has a chance to contribute to a team’s winning efforts—especially important if there’s one or two agents that tend to win individual contests.

Run it in Plecto: set up team-vs-team in a few clicks and let Plecto handle the scoring in real time with contests.

Call Center Incentive Ideas: Rewards That Actually Motivate

A contest is only as motivating as the prize behind it. Match the reward to the effort: small daily wins suit instant perks like a coffee run or first pick of shifts, while month-long contests deserve bigger incentives such as gift cards, an extra day off, or a team lunch. Rotate your rewards so they stay fresh, and celebrate winners publicly so recognition becomes part of the prize.

With Plecto's Reward Store, agents earn points for hitting their KPIs and redeem them for rewards you set, so your incentive program runs itself alongside the contests.

Run Call Center Gamification on Autopilot with Plecto

With these seven contest ideas, you’ll be able to enliven your call center office culture in no time. Plecto’s contest features are the perfect tool for running call center competitions—and with dashboards to help you out too, you’ll be able to build employee engagement, smash your KPIs, bring in more revenue, all while having a lot of fun along the way.

So what are you waiting for? Get started on creating some contests with Plecto today!