Interview: Badgeville's Kris Duggan on Gamification's Power of Persuasion

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

The Rise of the Engaged Enterprise

A pervasive lack of focus is epidemic in today’s workplace, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to the New York Times, the average American worker consumes 34 gigabytes of information and reads 100,000 words in a single day. At the same time, employees are constantly shifting their attention; computer users change windows or check email and other programs an average of 37 times an hour. Multitasking is no longer an art but a norm. 

Distraction is one of the most destructive forces facing businesses today. This lack of engaged focus rapidly erodes a company’s productivity, but it doesn’t limit itself to employees alone. Disengagement has an equally negative impact on key audiences like customers and partners as well.

The Risks of Distraction

Customers: Your customers are confronted with more competing messages, more options and more distractions than ever before. More than 30 billion apps have been installed on mobile devices, where people are spending 94 minutes a day — even more than the 75 minutes they’re spending on the web.

Employees: With additional email overload, internal instant messaging platforms, social media platforms and open work environments, employees are bombarded by distractions throughout the day. When an employee doesn’t remain focused on the job at hand, they find themselves forced to work longer hours, later into the night and on weekends to compensate. This can quickly lead to burn-out and disengagement. Accord to Gallup, 50 percent of employees today are disengaged at work, costing U.S. business US$ 300 billion per year in lost productivity.

Partners: The same distractions tugging at our customers and employees are also impacting our partners. Beyond the obstacles mentioned above, partners are struggling to keep up with the training and products of every OEM they represent. Partners are asked to take training courses, register deals and connect with customers, all while trying to keep their heads afloat. Our partners are suffering from an understandable lack of focus, and companies that become complacent about their partner networks are inviting significant risk.

The Elements of Focus

Having realized the importance of keeping audiences as focused as possible, businesses are making every attempt to achieve focus. When looking at examples where focus is regularly achieved, we find a common set of elements that include:

• A clearly defined goal
• A system of measurable progress leading to that goal
• A notion of status against achieving that goal
• A reward for reaching the goal

The focus concepts of goals, progress, status and reward aren’t novel; they’re often used concepts that appeal to the human psyche (e.g. Frequent Flyer Programs). But today’s games target more digitally sophisticated players and therefore require a more intricate and involved playing field.

Putting Games to Work

Just putting basic elements in front of individuals isn’t enough. Over the past several years, a growing number of businesses have started investing in gamification technologies to bring focus mechanics — goals, progress, status and rewards — into their digital experiences.

Gamification helps businesses engage with customers and motivate employees. By applying the same principles that inspire people to play games to websites and other online experiences, businesses can dramatically increase the size of their audiences, boost customer engagement, drive deeper employee motivation and increase revenues.

In effect, businesses are transforming themselves into “Engaged Enterprises,” a term that refers to leading-edge companies that are successfully engaging every aspect of their organizations into cohesive, collaborative, loyal and focused communities. These companies, such as IBM, Cisco, Jive and Bluewolf, are characterized by highly active, loyal and focused customers, employees and partners and they realize that through the adoption of gamification technology, they can gain a competitive advantage across every spectrum of their businesses.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com