How do you motivate collectors and call centre agents, beyond prizes and contests?

The short answer

In our experience collectors stay motivated when they can see their effort turn into results and pay. In our view prizes and contests help a little. What matters more is the chance to succeed: a fair share of the accounts that pay, goals a collector can reach and understand, recognition from a manager who knows them, and pay and holidays that are always right.

In our view the biggest lever on a collection floor is the accounts. A collector who keeps getting accounts they can’t succeed with stops trying, whatever the prize on offer.

Success is the motivator

In our experience collections is a job of many refusals and a few payments, and what keeps a collector going is seeing those few payments come, and seeing them come more often as they get better. In our experience a collector who works hard for a month and has little to show for it learns that effort doesn’t count. Where commission follows payments, that is also a pay problem.

That is why, in our view, motivation and the accounts can’t be separated. A floor that gives its easiest accounts to its best collectors leaves everyone else with the hardest work, and the people who most need early wins get the fewest. Why collectors quit, and how to reduce turnover covers this, and how an agency can load the dice in its collectors’ favour.

What moves effort on a floor

• A fair chance at the accounts that pay. In our view fair means an equal chance at the money, not equal counts. How to share accounts fairly across collectors.
• Goals they can reach and understand. Every collector should be able to work out their own pay and see what it takes to earn more, with goals set by what accounts like theirs usually return. How to pay collectors fairly when accounts differ.
• Feedback on what they control. Results by kind of account, against accounts like theirs, so improvement shows even on hard paper. What a fair collector scorecard measures.
• Coaching on the kinds of account they struggle with. Specific help, not general advice.
• Recognition. Specific, prompt and from someone who knows the work.
• The basics, always right. Call Centre Helper’s pillars of advisor morale (2026) start with getting pay, commission, bonuses and holidays right every time. One consultant quoted there puts it as "Never mess up an agent’s pay or holiday."

What the research says about recognition

Christiane Bradler, Robert Dur, Susanne Neckermann and Arjan Non ran a field experiment on recognition (Management Science, 2016). They hired more than 300 people for a three-hour data-entry task, and in a random sample of work groups the workers unexpectedly received public recognition after two hours. Recognition raised later performance substantially, especially when only the best performers were recognised, and most of the increase came from the workers who were not recognised.

It was a short task, not a collection floor. In our view the lesson carries over: unexpected praise for good work lifts the people around it as well, provided they believe they could earn it too.

Contests and prizes

In our experience many floors run contests. Noah Lim, Michael Ahearne and Sung Ham tested how sales contests should be designed (Journal of Marketing Research, 2009), in lab experiments and in field experiments with salespeople. Across the experiments, having more than one prizewinner raised effort; adding rank-ordered prizes on top of several winners did not boost effort or revenue.

On a collection floor, in our view, two more things matter:

• What the contest rewards. A contest on raw collections rewards the accounts people happened to get. Base it on what collectors control: improvement on their own past results, kept promises, quality reviews.
• The rules. A sponsored insideARM article by an employee of the collections software company PDCflow (2018) warns that a heavy emphasis on a bonus could lead some people to bend the rules on their calls, and suggests making compliance part of the requirements for incentives.

When there’s no budget

Writing in Call Centre Helper (2012), guest author Lorraine Harriott argued that agent motivation has more to do with how managers communicate than with spot prizes. Among her suggestions:

• ask agents what would improve their performance, and change what you can;
• explain your decisions, including the requests you can’t meet;
• give honest feedback: public praise when it’s earned, private support when it isn’t;
• give variety, by rotating people across work where you can.

What a manager can do this week

1. Check that every collector’s pay and commission is right, and fix any error the same day.
2. Look at who got which accounts last month. If some collectors only ever get the hardest work, change that first.
3. Praise one specific piece of good work for each collector, not just the top of the board.
4. Ask each collector what gets in their way, and fix one thing you can fix quickly.
5. If you run a contest, give several people a real chance to win, on measures they control.

Where agent matching fits

Agent matching changes which accounts each collector works, which is the part of motivation that is about the accounts rather than the manager. BestPair sends each account to the eligible collector who has done best with accounts like it, from the floor’s own call and payment history, inside the rules and workload limits the agency sets, and measures the result against a control group. In our view that gives each collector accounts they are better placed to succeed with; we haven’t measured its effect on motivation, and it doesn’t replace pay, recognition or a good manager. What predictive pairing is.

Sources

• Employee Recognition and Performance: A Field Experiment: Christiane Bradler, Robert Dur, Susanne Neckermann and Arjan Non, Management Science, 2016; a field experiment with a short data-entry task.
• Designing Sales Contests: Does the Prize Structure Matter?: Noah Lim, Michael Ahearne and Sung H. Ham, Journal of Marketing Research, 2009; lab and field experiments on contest prize structure.
• The 7 Pillars of Advisor Morale: Call Centre Helper, 28 January 2026; the pay and holiday quote is from consultant Alex McConville.
• Seven Ways to Motivate Your Agents, for Free: Call Centre Helper, Lorraine Harriott, 11 July 2012.
• Motivating Your Collection Floor Team the Right Way: insideARM, 18 June 2018, a sponsored article by a PDCflow employee.