If you believe that all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy, chances are you haven't experienced game mechanics in your workplace.
Although games have long been part of our daily lives, the application of game design to reward and encourage certain behaviors within the workplace and with customers has been steadily rising in the last two years.
Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan took some time out to answer a few of our questions on the headway gamification is making in businesses, what this spells for employee and customer engagement and what the future of game mechanics might look like.
Siobhan Fagan: How did you come to game mechanics?
Kris Duggan: When my co-founder and I first came up with the idea for Badgeville, we were looking at a few key trends that were colliding. First, web analytics had not changed for many years, and there was a missing opportunity for business to get a deeper look into user behavior. At the same time, social gaming companies were rising to success due to their great ability to drive user behavior using game mechanics and behavior analytics.
As a serial entrepreneur and sales executive, I've spent my career learning new ways to encourage performance across many different types of employees. We realized that providing a powerful SaaS platform where our customers could track user behavior and reward this behavior with game mechanics could drive substantial benefits for business.
SF: Do game mechanics work for everyone?
KD: Yes, but different game mechanics work for different audiences. A sales team may be motivated by highly competitive game mechanics, while a product team may be best motivated using collaborative gamification programs with reputation mechanics.
The most important part of a gamification program is to understand which mechanics will work for your audience. If you don't strategically think about this up front, you risk hurting your program versus helping it. Our customers come from virtually every industry, with audiences ranging from youth and teens to senior executives at the world's top corporations.
SF: How are game mechanics effective in ways that other engagement methods aren’t?
There are many different engagement methods available. However, few have such a direct and measurable impact on ROI compared to gamification. Fundamentally, game mechanics and gamification look at the key user behaviors that matter to your business and create programs to incentivize these behaviors. You can offer places for your users to engage, but without a gamification program, it is very challenging to encourage consistent and continued engagement.
SF: Do game mechanics change the way that people work?
KD: Game mechanics do not necessarily change the way people work, but they can very successfully encourage adoption of new business processes. For example, you may have invested in a modern CRM system which offers a wide range of functionality that would help your team become more efficient. However, just because the features exist, doesn't mean your employees will use them.
Gamification enables business managers to create a program that calls out the features and actions that they want their employees to perform and offers an easy way to both track these behaviors and reward them. Using gamification, our customers see adoption of enterprise software increase 20 percent or more. Through our partnerships and integrations with Salesforce.com, Yammer, IBM Connections, Drupal, Jive and Microsoft SharePoint, among other leading enterprise software platforms, we've supported many different audiences within enterprises, and can attest to the value of gamification for all employee and customer audiences.
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
