Genesys Cloud gamification: the handbook for performance leads

1.1 What it is for

Gamification turns performance objectives into performance points and shows them to agents and supervisors through scorecards and leaderboards in the Genesys Cloud Home view. Genesys places it inside performance management, whose purpose is to define objectives and measure individuals and teams against them, so supervisors can recognise good performance, diagnose issues and correct course. The stated aims include establishing coaching plans, promoting fairness and transparency, and bringing new agents up to speed faster.

That framing is the most important thing to understand before you configure anything. Gamification is a performance management instrument with a motivational interface, not a rewards scheme. Points exist to make objectives visible and feedback immediate. If the points are not connected to what you actually coach on, you have built a scoreboard for a game nobody needed to play.

1.2 The objects you work with

1.3 How points are calculated

• Points calculate in real time when agents meet or exceed the thresholds set for a metric.
• Between zone limits, points fall on a straight line. An agent halfway between the good limit and the target earns roughly halfway between the two point values, so zone widths and point steps define the incentive slope (see 4.4).
• Points are calculated per workday; a shift spanning two workdays splits its points across them.
• Points can go down during the day. Metrics change through the workday and points rise or fall with them; at the end of the workday the points reflect overall performance. Tell agents this on day one.
• Maximum points are your weightings. Genesys describes assigning maximum points as the way to give each metric a priority weight for a balanced scorecard. There is no separate weighting field: a metric's maximum points is its weight, and it is the main design lever you have.
• Out of bounds pays nothing. A value in a good zone earns the points set for that zone's limits, and target earns the maximum.
• Timing differs by view: contest data updates every 15 minutes, and Scorecard Insights holds data only up to yesterday, so a new metric appears on scorecards straight away but in Insights the next day.

1.4 Licensing and billing

Employee performance (real-time insights, gamification, learning and development, and coaching) is part of workforce engagement management. On Genesys's plan comparison, checked 13 November 2026, it is included in CX 3 and CX 4 and an add-on for CX 1 and CX 2.

On the add-on route, billing follows use, and one of the documented triggers is when a gamification point is generated for an agent. Since April 2026, administrators can also control WEM and speech and text analytics add-on licensing by assigning explicit permissions, which separates transcription from add-on billing. Some metrics carry their own requirements: the quality evaluation score metric and the Detected Topics metric each list the subscriptions they need in their release notes.

1.5 Who can see what

Three mechanisms control visibility. Roles and permissions decide who can view scorecards, leaderboards and profiles (the full lists are in 7.1); changes can take a few minutes to apply. Divisions decide who can manage a profile: only users with permission for the profile's division can view it, but members can come from any division, and a profile's division cannot be changed after the profile is created, so decide it first. Supervisors see custom profile leaderboards including all members, but can open an agent's scorecard only with Scorecard > View All and access to that agent's division.

For finer control, Genesys supports attribute-based access control policies on the reporting hierarchy, so supervisors see only agents in their reporting chain (direct reports or up to three levels deep) while administrators keep full access.

1.6 The limits that shape your design

2.1 Decide what you are trying to change

Write down, in a sentence each, the answers to these. They are decisions, not settings, but every setting later depends on them.

1. The three behaviours you want more of next quarter. Behaviours, not numbers: agents close the loop on email within the promised time, not improve adherence.
2. The one behaviour you fear people will sacrifice to win. It is almost always quality or courtesy.
3. How a part-time agent who works two days a week can be recognised.
4. What the reward is: time off, first choice of shifts, public thanks, or nothing. Gamification works without prizes, but decide that deliberately.
5. Who may see whose scores, and whether anyone outside the team should see leaderboards at all.

2.2 Set thresholds from real data, not ambition

Genesys's own advice when setting zone limits is to use your current analytics, in the Agents Performance views, to establish a baseline.

1. Open the agents performance view for the last 13 weeks, filtered to the population you plan to profile (the same queues and media types).
2. Read three numbers for each candidate metric: the median, the 75th percentile and the 25th percentile.
3. Set Target at about the 75th percentile, reachable by a good agent on an ordinary day; set the good edge near the median; set the out-of-bounds edge where a real problem starts.
4. Check the result against the behaviour you fear people will sacrifice. If around a third of the team is already at Target, the goal is too soft; if very few reach it, most of the team will stop looking.

2.3 Turn gamification on

Go to Admin > Performance & Engagement > Gamification Profiles, click Settings (or go to Admin > Performance & Engagement > Gamification Settings), and on the Settings tab enable the Gamification toggle under General. Optionally set a Start Date, then save. Once activated, gamification starts collecting data and calculating points; data and points display from the start date, or from the day you enable it. The start date can be reset at any time, up to 30 days in the past.

Switching gamification off stops the calculation of points, and since April 2024 the leaderboards view is disabled entirely in organisations that have disabled gamification. Treat the toggle as a major decision, not a pause button.

2.4 Grant permissions

Build dedicated roles rather than adding permissions to existing ones, so you can audit them later. Agents need Ui > AgentActivity > View, Gamification > Leaderboard > View and Gamification > Scorecard > View, plus the permissions that light up the rest of the Activity view: Workforce Management > Agent Schedule > View (for punctuality and the mini schedule), Coaching > Appointment > Participate (coaching widget), Learning > Assignment > View (learning modules) and Quality > Evaluation > Edit Agent Sign-off (evaluation widgets). Supervisors need leaderboard and scorecard View and View All (the View All permissions are division-aware), and profile view and update.

2.5 Choose your profile structure

Every organisation has one default profile, with default metrics, objectives and membership. You can customise it as a fallback, but you cannot rename or delete it or change its description, status or division. Custom profiles measure selected groups of agents, for example technical support, chat support and escalations, and their settings override the default profile for their members.

Use a separate custom profile when the work is different, because agents ranked against each other must be playing the same game. Do not split just to be tidy: each profile is another thing to maintain, and a leaderboard of two people is an awkward comparison between colleagues, not a competition.

• Media type: handle time on email is not the same quantity as on voice.
• Agent maturity: new starters cannot fairly be ranked against experienced agents.
• Queue purpose: retention agents who rightly spend longer with customers will always lose a handle-time comparison with a service queue.
• Working pattern: a part-time or flexible pool may deserve its own profile (see 4.7).

2.6 Create the profile and set its details

Go to Admin > Performance & Engagement > Gamification Profiles and click New Profile. New profiles inherit all metrics from the default profile in the same state, enabled or disabled.

2.7 Configure the metrics

The Metrics tab is available once the profile is saved, with the default profile's metrics and objectives available to include. For each metric you can create one that is specific to this profile (it does not sync with the default profile), copy one from the default profile (later changes to the default flow into the copy), or edit an existing one. Metrics cannot be copied from a custom profile into the default profile. Use Copy when several profiles share a definition; use Create when a team needs its own bands.

On the metric's Details tab set a display name in the language the floor already uses, the media types, the initial direction and direction (both, inbound or outbound) and the queues. Filtering is where precision comes from: one measure can become several fair metrics by queue. Whether a metric allows media type, direction or queue filtering is a property of its definition.

On the Objective tab choose the objective type (some metrics have a fixed type), the time unit and precision (up to five decimal places), the upper and lower limit of each zone, and the points for each zone, either a single value or a range. Enable the metric and save.

2.8 Which metrics exist

Gamification includes predefined metrics, most of which you can customise; the metric type sets the unit, such as percent, seconds or number. Documented examples include average handle time, average after-call work, quality evaluation score, Detected Topics (the share of analysed interactions where the agent referred to chosen topics), punctuality and monthly attendance, plus any external metric you import.

The full list available to your organisation is data, not documentation. Read it from a profile's Metrics tab, or call GET /api/v2/gamification/metricdefinitions (permission gamification:profile:view), and record what you find, with the date, in your design document.

2.9 Add members

Add agents individually, or by queue, group or business unit. Adding by group is the maintainable option: individual adds turn every joiner, leaver and move into a manual task. Make your Genesys groups mirror your teams and add the group. Add new starters on their first working day: points are not generated for external metrics uploaded for dates before an agent joined the profile.

2.10 Decide auto-assignment on purpose

With auto-assignment on, Genesys assigns agents who are not in a custom profile to the default profile, moves agents removed from a custom profile there, and assigns new users to it. With it off, nobody is added to the default profile automatically and administrators manage its membership by hand.

Turn it on if the default profile is a sensible profile for everyone else, so nobody falls through. Turn it off if the default profile holds placeholder metrics, or every new user, including testers and supervisors, will start earning points against a scorecard nobody designed for them. Record the decision and review it after launch.

2.11 Test with a small group, then launch properly

1. Run the profile for a week with a few volunteer agents.
2. Check that the numbers agree with the analytics views supervisors already trust. If they disagree, you have a filter problem (media type, direction or queues); fix it before the whole floor sees the board.
3. Flip a metric card on the agent scorecard: it shows the definition name, unit, precision, media type, initial direction and queues. That is how an agent checks you are measuring what you said.
4. Launch in a team meeting: show a scorecard and a leaderboard, explain that points move down as well as up during the day, say which thresholds are provisional, and hand out a short guide to reading the scorecard.

2.12 Set up a contest (not in week one)

The contest wizard has five tabs. General sets the name and description, dates, winning criteria (highest total score, which adds up daily points, or highest overall percentage of the score, which measures progress towards the goal), the profile, an announcement date and ranking anonymisation: none, all participants except winners or the top three, or all participants. Metrics takes up to 10 metrics, each with a weight and a minimum qualifier, the points a contestant needs in that metric to be eligible to win. Participants lists everyone in the profile, with filters by manager or work team. Prizes takes up to three tiers with a number of winners each, a name, a description and an image. Then review and create.

Closing a contest is manual: a supervisor must complete every contest, and those waiting appear as Pending completion. Before completing, you can disqualify a participant (if a contest is already finished, their scores are set to zero) or override a tier, for example for a draw. Once completed with winners, results cannot be changed, even if the underlying metrics are later corrected. Completed contests stay visible for 96 hours before moving to the inactive list. Duplicate gives you a pre-filled form for a recurring contest.

• Choose percentage of the score for contests of a week or more: total score rewards days worked, while percentage of the goal puts a part-time agent on the same footing as a full-time one.
• Use minimum qualifiers as your anti-gaming control, so a handle-time contest cannot be won by someone whose quality has collapsed.
• Remove long-term absentees from participants when you create the contest: Genesys counts all participants in performance averages, including inactive users, unless they are removed manually.
• Give contest closure a named owner and a diary slot, because results are fixed once you complete it.

2.13 Bring in an external metric

External metrics let you put measures from other systems on the scorecard. Genesys's examples include third-party CSAT, daily sales, first contact resolution, leads generated, visits booked, retention rate, refund rate and NPS. There are three steps: configure the external metric definition (a name, a unit of seconds, percent, number or currency, a precision, a default objective type and a retention period in months); add and enable the metric in the profiles that use it; and upload the data through the gamification API. Test the feed with Genesys's external metric testing guidance before enabling it for the floor.

3.1 Every morning

1. Open the Home view in supervisor mode from the View As list. Supervisor widgets include learning and coaching compliance, real-time adherence, contests and an insights summary.
2. Look at the insights summary, which shows the three highest and three lowest performers. Both groups deserve a message, and the people doing well are the ones most often forgotten.
3. Check any live contest's Participants tab, which shows eligibility and refreshes every 15 minutes.
4. If someone had an excellent day, send a recognition now, while it is specific.
5. Do not change a threshold on the strength of one day.

3.2 Weekly

• Review the profile trend in Scorecard Insights with a weekly interval, comparing this week with last. Percent of goal is an agent's accrued points divided by the points available in the period; sort by improvement to find the biggest movers in both directions.
• Look for the shape, not the winner. If the whole profile sits near the top, targets are too soft; if the bottom third sits far below, targets are unreachable or the metric measures something agents cannot control. Either way it is the design that needs fixing.
• Close and open contests in the same slot, so recognition arrives promptly, then duplicate the next one.
• Check members against joiners, leavers and anyone who has changed team, channel or working pattern.
• Have at least one coaching conversation started by gamification data. If you cannot, the metrics are not connected to anything you manage; go back to 2.1.

3.3 Monthly and quarterly

• Review the 4-week interval monthly and the 13-week interval quarterly; that is what the two intervals are for.
• Re-baseline zones against analytics using the method in 2.2. Publish any change, the reason and the date, and change no more than one or two thresholds a month; if everything needs moving, the design needs rethinking.
• For each enabled metric, name the coaching action a supervisor takes when an agent misses it. A metric with no action attached is noise; disable it, and delete metrics you will not use again, because disabled metrics still count towards the 50.
• Retire a contest people have stopped talking about.
• Report upwards on behaviour change, not points: movement in quality, adherence and handle time, and how many agents use their scorecard.

3.4 What agents see

From the Home view an agent sees their schedule, coaching appointments, evaluation summary, scorecard, modules, personal bests, contests, adherence and today's leaderboard. The scorecard summary shows the day's points, the all-time total, the agent's average for that day of the week and the average for everyone in the same profile, with daily points over the reporting interval and a dotted line for the average. The day-of-week average is a quiet help: it compares a Monday with Mondays, so nobody is discouraged by a day that is naturally harder.

3.5 What supervisors see, and what they can do

Scorecard Insights compares each agent with their goals, with themselves over time and with their peer group, by profile, manager and a weekly or monthly comparison of periods. For each metric it shows percent of goal, leaderboard rank and average value, and View Objective shows where the agent sits against the objective. The Follow-up actions are the most useful thing on the screen: send recognition, create a coaching appointment, assign a module, or message the agent. Supervisors can also share a link or export (to CSV in US comma-separated format, or a printable view; export is available in a web browser, not the desktop app).

Gamification data should start the coaching conversation, never be the whole of it.

3.6 Recognition

Since June 2024, supervisors can send personalised recognition from the scorecard, Scorecard Insights or an agent's profile card. There are four types (Thank You, Congratulations, High Performance and Company Values), each with a personal message previewed before sending, and the agent sees a banner in their Home view. Since January 2026 an API lists past recognitions for organisations running a formal recognition programme.

3.7 Resetting personal bests

Over time agents reach personal bests that stop being useful targets. Performance administrators or supervisors can reset them by choosing a new start date on the Actions tab of the gamification settings, between 30 days in the past and 60 days in the future. Use natural boundaries, such as the start of a season, after a major metric change or the start of the financial year, and tell people you are doing it.

4.1 Twelve principles

1. Every metric must be coachable. If missing it does not prompt a conversation, disable it.
2. Weight with maximum points, deliberately. Agents read the point values as a statement of what you care about, and they are right to.
3. Pair efficiency with quality, always. Never run handle time without a quality or CSAT metric in the same profile.
4. Use target area for anything with a right range, such as handle time and after-call work.
5. Keep the metric count low. Each metric dilutes the others and lengthens the explanation.
6. Make Target reachable. If nobody earns the gold asterisk, it is decoration.
7. Make the board readable in five seconds: plain names, one unit per metric, a consistent direction of better.
8. Design for the people who are not in the top ten. They are most of your workforce and most of your attrition risk.
9. Explain the movement: points go up and down during the day.
10. Change thresholds in the open: what, why and from when.
11. Contests are seasoning, not the meal. They should reinforce the standing profile, not reward something you discourage the rest of the month.
12. Review the human impact as well as the numbers. Ask agents how the leaderboard makes them feel; if the answer is anxious or cynical, change the design, not the message.

4.2 The points budget method

Genesys sets no daily total, so set one yourself. A round daily maximum of 1,000 points makes every metric's ceiling a percentage of the whole, which is exactly the priority weight Genesys describes, and lets agents do the arithmetic in their heads. An illustrative inbound voice profile follows.

• Reading the top row tells everyone what the contact centre values; changing 300 to 150 changes the stated priorities without a memo, which is why such changes must be published and discussed.
• A day with no quality evaluation (evaluations are sampled) caps that agent at 700. Tell agents, or the person who happened not to be evaluated looks as if they underperformed; if evaluations are sparse, weight the metric lower.
• Weekly and interval maximums are simple multiples: five days at 1,000 is 5,000 a week. Five days totalling 3,967 points is 79.3% of goal, the same calculation Scorecard Insights uses.

4.3 Choosing metrics: a coverage test

A healthy profile covers four kinds of thing. Three metrics of the same kind over-weight one dimension and leave you blind in another.

4.4 Designing the zones

Three rules follow from points falling on a straight line between limits. Make the slope worth climbing: if good pays 100 and target 110, nobody changes behaviour for 10 points. Leave a gap between the out-of-bounds edge and the good edge, so an ordinary bad day does not collapse the score; the gap is where coaching happens. And work out what a mediocre day pays before you save. A target area example for handle time, in seconds, with a 350-point ceiling, follows.

• An agent at 345 seconds, halfway between target and the upper good limit, earns about 300 points.
• An agent at 285 seconds, faster than target, earns about 234 points, not more. The fast but careless agent earns less than the agent on target; scored as lower is better, the same numbers would have taught everyone to rush.
• These figures are calculated by straight-line interpolation from the values above; check what Genesys shows in your own organisation before you publish a design.

4.5 Failure modes, and the setting that prevents each

4.6 Making it feel fair

Genesys gives you three real fairness levers. Separate profiles: agents are only ranked within their own profile. Contest anonymisation: running a contest anonymised except for the winners lets people chase a position without an audience, and if a contest is fully anonymised, winners are anonymised in the banner too. Several winners per tier: Gold, Silver and Bronze each take a number of winners, and many prizes engage a team far more than one.

And one non-setting: be careful with the data behind each metric. Points come from queue, schedule and quality data, so a wrong schedule means wrong adherence points. Genesys handles some cases, for example a resolved evaluation dispute updates the scorecard in real time, but checking a number against reality before repeating it is your habit to keep.

4.7 Fairness mechanics that work

• Report on percentage of goal, not raw points, in team reviews: it allows for the points available.
• Run short contests: a week is long enough to matter and short enough that everyone gets several chances a quarter.
• Rotate what contests emphasise, or the contest metric becomes the real scorecard.
• Give the bottom of the board a way up: a most improved award can be taken from the improvement sort in Scorecard Insights at no extra effort.
• Check the expected distribution before launch: if almost everyone sits close to target, results are decided by luck, so widen the zones.

4.8 What to say at launch

1. Here are the things we measure and the points each is worth, because that is what we care about.
2. Points update during the day and can go down as well as up; the end-of-day figure is what counts.
3. The handle time target is a range, not a floor: being too fast scores less, not more.
4. These thresholds are provisional for four weeks, and we will review them with you using real data.
5. Nobody is disciplined by a leaderboard. It tells you where you are; your team leader helps you with what to do about it.

5.1 Inbound voice, general service

Profile Inbound Voice General, reporting intervals of 4 and 13 weeks, a leaderboard rank limit that covers the team, and auto-assignment on if the default profile is a sensible fallback.

• Quality carries the largest weight, which states that service comes first and stops handle time being gamed.
• Handle time is a target area with a lower out-of-bounds limit, so a rushed call earns nothing.
• Adherence is a simple two-zone pass or fail habit, so nobody games breaks for points.
• Punctuality uses Genesys's dedicated objective type and the scorecard's punctuality card.

5.2 Digital team: email, chat and messaging

A separate profile, because handle time on email and chat is a different quantity from voice.

• CSAT leads, because on digital channels the customer's own view is the cleanest quality signal and balances handle time.
• Handle time bands are deliberately wide, because written work varies with the problem; the lower limit stops one-line replies.
• Remember the external metric rules in 2.13: the feed must arrive within seven days, and group averages are not supported.

5.3 New starters, first 12 weeks

Often the most valuable profile and the one most organisations never create: without it, new agents see a board they cannot win and disengage early.

• Dependability outweighs output, because it is what predicts success in the first months.
• Handle time is present but soft: a new agent racing an experienced agent's handle time learns bad habits.
• Quality is scored against a new starter standard, so Target is reachable.
• Plan the move into the main profile when you create this one, and reset personal bests on that date.

5.4 Retention and account management

Here a generic profile fails worst: it pays people to end conversations with the customers you most want to keep.

5.5 A one-week contest, end to end

Quality Week: best quality at sensible speed, for one week. Winning criteria: highest overall percentage of the score, so part-time agents can win. Profile: Inbound Voice General, so there is nothing new to learn. Announcement: immediately. Anonymisation: all participants except winners or the top three.

• Participants: the profile, filtered by manager to the teams that worked that week, with long-term absentees removed.
• Prizes: Gold for two winners, Silver for three, Bronze for five. Ten prizes across a team of 60 is a competition; one prize is a lottery.
• An illustrative scoring check, applying the weights to each agent's percentage of goal per metric: agent A at 92, 88 and 95% scores 0.92; agent B at 99, 60 and 70% scores 0.79; agent C at 85, 95 and 90% scores 0.90. B has the best quality and still comes third, because the weights do not let one metric win. Confirm how your organisation calculates contest scores before publishing an example like this.
• Close it the following Monday: review participants, override tiers for any tie, disqualify anyone who did not qualify, then complete, announce and duplicate for next month.

5.6 Bringing third-party CSAT into a scorecard

1. Create an external metric definition, for example Post-interaction CSAT, unit percent, precision one, default objective higher is better, with a retention period matching your reporting.
2. Add and enable it in the profile, with zones and points.
3. Agree the feed with the integration team: daily, landing every morning, because data more than seven days old is not reflected and future-dated data appears overnight.
4. Test the feed before enabling the metric for the floor.
5. Tell agents the card depends on an external feed: a missing score is usually a feed problem, and the profile average is not shown for external metrics. Agree an alert for gaps and a published rule for missing days.

5.7 Team versus individual competition

Genesys gamification ranks individuals within a profile. The healthiest mix we have found is to score individuals and celebrate in teams: rank people on the leaderboard, but give recognition and contest prizes on team percentage of goal, taken from Scorecard Insights. Team rewards discourage individual heroics that damage service, and the contest participant filters by manager or work team make a team contest easy to set up. Genesys's employee performance use case describes competitions, badges and social elements as coming soon, so check current release notes before designing around team-level features.

7.1 Gamification permissions

7.2 Where things are

7.3 Useful gamification API endpoints

For administration at scale, reporting outside Genesys Cloud and configuration kept under change control. All are listed in Genesys's public API specification.

7.4 Glossary