The three-month-new CEO of Badgeville, Jon Shalowitz, made a splash at GSummit this week with his own attendance, two company speakers, and the engagement bar (serving engagement, not drinks).
We managed to speak with Shalowitz about his perspective of the gamification industry, and he had some intriguing thoughts on where the field’s focus should be.
Shalowitz says gamification is growing up. Specifically, gamification is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have for the standard enterprise stack. Gamification has established an impressive presence in the consumer space and on public facing websites, but it is time to shift focus towards serviceability and integration with existing enterprise platforms. This will ensure the gamification industry is ready for large enterprises already asking not “if” they should implement gamification, but rather “when” and “how” to implement those systems. Businesses are no longer stealing resources from other departments, but rather are establishing entire budgets purely for gamification implementation, which indicates just how seriously these business are taking engagement.
In reaction to these market shifts, Badgeville is strengthening their platform to be an enterprise-grade solution. Integrating with the platforms these enterprises already have (from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and others) is a big part of this process.
Badgeville uses this integration to their advantage by enabling their platform to predict and interpret how users interact with the established applications, and provide feedback and analysis on top of simply improving user engagement.
This data gathering, according to Shalowitz, is actually part of Badgeville’s layered solutions. The primary gamification objective of “turbocharging” engagement is followed by helping customers learn something about their employees (if internal deployment) or their customers (external deployment). Advanced analytics use this data to determine things like which employees are better at what tasks.
This all contributes to Shalowitz’ goals for Badgeville: drive engagement, tell the customer things about their employees and customers that they didn’t know about, and increase the overall success of the program in which the gamification is implemented.
Shalowitz seems optimistic that gamification can live up to the increasing demand in the enterprise market. It is just important that gamification platform providers intentionally integrate with, and ultimately improve the functionality of, the existing enterprise platforms in place.
While at Gsummit we also interviewed Badgeville’s Chief Design Officer, Steve Sims.
To find more podcast interviews from similar events, check out Clark Buckner’s list of tech conferences at TechnologyAdvice.com.
Listen to this interview and more on the TechnologyAdvice Soundcloud.
Takeaways:
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Gamification is becoming a must-have in any enterprise stack
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Gamification platforms must integrate with an enterprise’s existing tools
- Data that gamification platforms can collect about employees and customers can be as useful to clients as increased engagement
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This interview was provided by Gsummit media partner TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company that is dedicated to educating, advising, and connecting the buyers and sellers of business technology. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.
