The good manager walks around his or her centre, listens to staff and provides active supervision. They shoulder the responsibility for morale and for discipline and, just like a good old-fashioned ward round by a matron, they can only do this by getting close to the action. You can't expect staff to care if you don't seem to. Good team leaders are more important than any incentive scheme. The best are actively involved in motivating their team in friendly rivalry with the others in the centre.
White boards are generally a sign of a well-managed call centre.
Take the group, for instance, tasked with making outbound calls for credit card debt reduction pledges. This example also goes to show that you do not have to bankrupt the centre with flashy incentives to keep staff. Nothing is more likely to de-motivate staff than the feeling that they are a small cog in a big wheel unable to do much more than gather information from a customer to be passed along the line. Obviously some very complex customer issues can't be dealt with in one go. But careful analysis should help managers identify ways of enabling operators to deal with an ever widening range of calls, to build their knowledge and their ability to satisfy the customer and to hear more often that elusive 'Thank you'.