Does your company need Gamification?

Gamification is already one of the hottest trends on the IT market. Vendors are implementing game mechanics into their products and customers start thinking that the gamification - is a magic pill that will engage the employees and make them productive. Badgeville CEO, Chris Duggan, recently gave some helpful tips about the gamification. Badgeville - is one of the two business-gamification kings (the second - is Bunchball). Badgeville provides IT vendors the gamification platform, which allows them to quickly embed game mechanics into their products. For example, Badgeville's gamification engine works in Salesforce, Yammer, IBM Connections, Drupal, Jive and SharePoint.



First of all, Chris says that in most cases gamification can't change things from bad to good. It can only change things from good to excellent. If a company has poor management, if manager can't properly identify and measure key success metrics, if he is not able to give a proper feedback and reward to an employee - gamifying such business is useless. If your corporate website has bad, not interesting content, then no game mechanics will force users (clients) to come and write comments.

The second tip - Gamification doesn't work without community. I.e. if there are no social relations, no social communication between employees. One of the major gamification components is the human desire to be valued by colleagues, to raise own reputation (that's the goal of these badges, ratings). But if a person doesn't care what his collegues think of him - gamification won't work. Therefore, before implementing game mechanics - create a community (social connections).

Third. As a rule gamification comes to company as a layer in other enterprise software (CRM, Helpdesk, intranet portals ...). Therefore, you can use gamification not just for encouraging employees to achieve business goals (for example, give an award for 10 sales), but also to use it for optimizing the use of the enterprise software.

The fact that the enterprise software is usually utilized all enterprise software deployments are about 50 percent utilized. For example, because an employee doesn't want to open CRM system to update customer profile every time. Thus, more than 50% of your investment in enterprise software is wasted. Game mechanics allows to reward employees for doing such simple activities and make working with enterprise software interesting. Thus you will be able to make the most of your IT systems and make your business much more efficient.

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