The Best in Enterprise Gamification
Enterprises have a reputation for moving slower with innovative technologies. The stereotypes are well worn, and at this point, somewhat hackneyed. Take cloud services for example. Smaller businesses originally jumped on this innovative technology to stay in step, and get ahead of their larger competitors. In contrast, larger organizations are still moving slower than expected to adopt these new services.
However, this does not seem to be the trend in gamification. In fact, when it comes to gamification, enterprise organizations seem increasingly open to innovation. Maybe that’s because it presents a possible solution to the startling engagement crisis affecting the worldwide workforce. In any case, enterprises are moving faster than normal. Case in point: as of 2012, enterprise users already comprised 38% of the gamification market.
It’s possible gamification has an upper hand in adoption rate among enterprises because many large organizations had already pooled resources together to develop engagement solutions for their employees before the emergence of the term around 2010.
When considering a gamification platform, enterprises have their own set of needs. Primarily, they should search for a solution that offers flexibility. The more use cases offered by one platform, the greater chance to use it across departments and realize greater ROI. Enterprises may even consider a platform that they can use to engage both their employees and their customers.
The following three vendors offer engagement solutions that are particularly relevant for enterprise use, as analyzed by our team at TechnologyAdvice.
Pluck
A true enterprise solution, Pluck software bears many of the hallmarks of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. The company’s tagline, “Integrated Customer Interactions,” accurately describes their product’s capabilities. The platform supports functionality for social login, blogs, photo galleries, social contests, forums, and numerous other use cases.
While gamification is not the sole focus of Pluck’s platform, the use of game elements to increase engagement can be found throughout this powerful software. Though Pluck’s platform focuses mainly on the triad of points, badges, and leaderboards, the unique value to enterprises comes from the seemingly limitless ways to apply these elements.
For example, since Pluck offers community moderation as one of its features, community managers can reward customers who post most frequently on the organization’s site with extra loyalty points or badges. Software permissions can also be adjusted so influential users can post without moderation.
Interestingly, Pluck’s second-party award system, which allows users to gain points based on how the community engages with their contributions, can also be used as a symbol of trust. In the case of user reviews, members with higher community status would hypothetically write more influential reviews, and therefore make better targets for promotions and other marketing efforts.
So while Pluck’s PBLs aren’t anything groundbreaking, it’s the freedom they give organizations to properly utilize these feedback mechanisms that makes this platform so appealing to enterprises.
Ambition
Focused on increasing employee productivity, Ambition’s platform calculates a unique “ambition score” for each employee, which gives managers a clear picture of each employee’s contributions. Ambition works mainly with sales teams, but also includes onboarding features that help new hires get up to speed.
Ambition also allows managers to divide their employees into teams that are ranked on an office leaderboard. To avoid demotivating certain employees, Ambition groups competitors into teams, thereby promoting collaboration while preventing any one employee from feeling isolated.
While Ambition does not mention “gamification” anywhere on their website, game elements are central to their value proposition. In addition to using a leaderboard, Ambition also allows employees to be assigned job titles, which adds detail to their Ambition profile. Additionally, employees can create names for their respective teams, add logos to their team profile, and compete over the span of a season. Placing a time limit (under the guise of a season) helps highlight a sense of progress as teams compete against their inter-departmental colleagues, as well as against employees from other departments.
Finally, Ambition’s platform also visualizes an employee’s progress rather than just simply relying on a numerical value to represent progress.
Mindspace
While the previous two companies offer organizations out-of-the-box solutions, enterprises often have the budget to implement entirely unique engagement campaigns. In these cases, they should consider digital agency Mindspace. Mindspace focuses on gamification, and combines game mechanics, user experience, learning theory, and design to produce gamification solutions for increasing customer loyalty, training program effectiveness, and employee engagement.
Mindspace was actually the force behind Expedia’s most successful promotional campaign, which featured gamification as well. Using narrative elements, Mindscape offered Expedia users the chance to take an avatar on a journey around the world, during which they completed different missions and earned Expedia Reward points. Each action users took through their avatar also generated valuable data that Expedia could use to inform future marketing campaigns. Besides all the data and engagement, Expedia also realized a 20:1 ROI.
So whether enterprises are looking for out of the box gamification solutions that they can customize to fit their business goals, or an agency that can develop a totally unique application, there are plenty of gamification solutions to choose from. The above companies are simply three of the finest.
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