As we move into our next installment of GSummit (June 10-13 in San Francisco), we look at our past GSummit speakers and experts that have helped shape the user engagement space. This week’s spotlight Gamification Expert is Kevin Werbach–Associate Professor at The Wharton School at UPenn and teacher in the massively successful online Gamification Class on…
With the consistently sold-out success of our Certification Workshops at GSummit each year, we decided to add a workshop experience to the regular conference agenda FOR ALL ATTENDEES to participate it. We call them Hands-on Labs and they’re going to be one of the best aspects of this year’s event–guaranteed! Each of the 90-minute Labs will offer a limited group…
Employee engagement if often one of the most overlooked aspects of business management. Indeed, while there has always been a heavy emphasis on keeping customers interested in interacting with the business, there is often no talk of how to keep employees themselves enthusiastic about what they are doing. And this is definitely not going to be good, as employees’ lack of enthusiasm will undoubtedly affect their performance. So, how do you bring back their interest?
It’s a matter of time before more and more companies from all other industries look at, consider, and eventually embrace such an innovative concept likegamification into their business. This is the story of mobile service carrier T-Mobile and their next generation customer experience.
In order to keep up with the renewing advances in mobile technology, companies within the industry must be a step ahead of their competition when it comes to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Its ever-challenging environment is dictated by the constant evolution of mobile devices and represents an ongoing source of issues, ignited by customer queries on functions and capabilities of a mobile device. With this in mind and upon J.D. Power’s advice, T-Mobile created T-Community, a social business Jive platform built with the purpose of logging all known technical and general customer issues and sharing them across the company.
Are you as engaged as a zombie?
Strengthened by its early success, gamification is now becoming a staple in the arsenal of world-class companies everywhere. But it only represents one tool in addressing a larger business challenge that remains unanswered: How do you comprehensively manage user behaviors across all your digital properties to fight the engagement crisis. In this talk, Badgeville’s Chief Strategy Officer Kris Duggan will discuss the engagement challenges faced by 21st century enterprises, and how they can leverage gamification, along with other key engagement mechanics, to fight them in this session from GSummit SF 2013
Be sure to also subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest videos from GSummit SF 2013 as they’re released. You can also download a copy of this presentation by downloading it here.
By now, most executives and HR professionals know that employee engagement is both important and woefully lacking. But despite all the time and money invested into engagement initiatives, many organizations still aren’t moving the needle. Why?
Whenever I ask business leaders, “Whose job is engagement?” I usually hear one of these answers:
Both good answers, but partial answers.
According to IDG Research 43% of engagement comes from intrinsic motivation, by definition factors that are completely outside the influence of company mangers.
What is missing from many efforts to increase employee engagement, are the individual employees themselves.
While games are an important and fun aspect of gamification, the main focus of gamification should not be the games, but rather the game mechanics. Game mechanics are what makes gamification so motivating and flexible; depending on the goal for implementing gamification, the games may vary considerably, but the most basic game mechanics will have the same purpose: to engage the user. Because of this, when companies evaluate the impact of gamification, they should not be focused on how many points the user achieved or whether or not they won the game, but rather on the increase or decrease in their productivity after the installment of game mechanics.
The Gamification Revolution is the only live gamification webcast featuring Gabe Zichermann and fellow gamification experts every week. Join us and have all of your gamification questions answered by these experts. This week’s guest was Bob Marsh, CEO of LevelEleven, which is a company that develops gamification apps for Salesforce.
Be sure to catch our next episode this Thursday, August 1 at 1PM ET/1800 GMT, where we feature Naureen Meraj, Senior Global Director, Gamification & Strategic Engagement at NTT Data.
Remember you can participate in the show if you sign-in and RSVP! Signing in will allow you to receive show reminders, ask questions, and even join Gabe and our guest for a live question.
In this week’s episode, Gabe and Bob discuss the theory behind motivating sales teams with gamification mechanics. They explore interesting topics as to why employees need more motivation beyond commission, what really determines an effective salesman, how gamification allows employees to track performance, and what’s unique about LevelEleven’s approach to gamification design. They also take a number of questions from the audience and a special video guest who comes on to ask about the potential for gamification desensitization in the future. Watch the full video below:
Be sure to check out next week’s episode on Thursday at 1PM ET.
Julie has recently been hired to a global sales team, she is eager to prove her worth. She keeps receiving countless emails letting everyone know her new co-workers are being awarded badges and accumulating points in some way. When she tries to find out why she is getting all these public notifications that are clogging up her inbox, her manager tells her it’s some gaming platform his boss made him use – “it’s a mandate from up high, I had nothing to do with it”.
During lunch, her cubicle mate tells her that three months ago the company decided to implement a gaming platform announced with great fanfare by the higher ups, but since then the only thing that’s different is that they have a desktop app that gives them “meaningless points for meaningless actions”. Once her lunch break is over, she marks all the emails as spam.
Could this have turned out differently?
Starting my own company was always the obvious choice. I was raised to look up to entrepreneurs as successful and independent visionaries. I set out to help people to realize the potential of cloud- based services and founded Alien Interactive in 1999. Almost 14 years ago, it was not an easy task. But my vision was bigger than that. I wanted to find a way to offer people what games and sports had offered me; the enjoyment of motivation, determination and deep engagement. The word gamification was not yet heard of but I was fascinated by the thought of making an engaging game out of less exciting work-days. But almost 14 years ago, without the adoption of technology we see today, it was even harder for people to understand that idea than the potential of cloud services.
My entrepreneurial ambition spawned, and still does, from one fundamental stance: There is no reason why work shouldn’t be a thrilling experience. By adding a well-designed engagement system to our enterprise-environment we can take advantage of the elements of games and sports to truly engage users, employees and partners.
The Gamification Revolution is the only live gamification webcast featuring Gabe Zichermann and fellow gamification experts every week. Join us and have all of your gamification questions answered by these experts.
This past week’s guest was SAP Senior Innovation Strategist, Mario Herger. In this week’s episode, Gabe and Mario discuss the challenges involved with designing gamification for employees in a corporate environment, especially when they’re forced to use it.
Be sure to catch a special episode tomorrow at 1PM EST with Gabe Zichermann as he discusses the release of his newest book also titled The Gamification Revolution
The following is an Op-Ed by Michael Bertrand, Project Manager and Marketing Associate at TemboSocial This year gamification will have 20% of Global 2000 organizations playing, and by 2014 this number is expected to rise to 70%. Enterprise gamification takes elements from computer gaming and integrates them into your business to encourage a desired behavior, such…
Gamification Experts are using today’s New York City Gamification Summit to announce the formation of the first industry association called The Engagement Alliance. This not-for-profit organization has set its sights on the study of the science behind the power of game mechanics to create behavior change.
