game on

"Could games transform the way that organizations engage with customers and employees?" asks Cath Everett.The concept of gamification involves taking well-honed computer gaming techniques and re-applying them in a non- games environment. Employed today primarily by the marketing community, particularly...

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"Could games transform the way that organizations engage with customers and employees?" asks Cath Everett.

The concept of gamification involves taking well-honed computer gaming techniques and re-applying them in a non- games environment. Employed today primarily by the marketing community, particularly in a social media context, the aim is to boost customer loyalty and engagement by making interaction with brands more enjoyable.

Cath Everett has been a business and technology journalist since 1992. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian and ZDNet and was previously a staff reporter for Computing Weekly.

Obvious examples of such techniques include location-based social networking sites, such as Foursquare and Gowalla. They offer smartphone users rewards and discounts when they "check in" to places, venues or retail outlets in their local vicinity, while the site providers obtain revenue from their advertising partners. But Brian Burke, an analyst at Gartner, believes that such offerings are only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, by 2014, he predicts that "gamified" services in the sphere of consumer goods marketing will become as important as Facebook, eBay and Amazon are today.

As a result, more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one application utilizing gaming methods in a bid to increase customer retention, Burke says. James Riley, Managing Director at digital marketing agency Effect, agrees that gamification is likely to have a profound effect on marketing and brand development over the next few years, with game-based campaigns already starting to emerge.

The appeal, he believes, is in "creating fun in things that traditionally weren't, by playing to human nature." This means that "you give people rewards and allow them to progress over time using techniques, such as ramping, to give them new challenges. But it's also about achievement and their quest for status in a peer group," Riley explains.

The ultimate aim, however, is to create an experience that will engage users emotionally and continue to keep them engaged over a period of time, he adds. What this means in practice is that gamification concepts can be applied not only to external customers but also to internal staff in order to boost motivation, change behavior, increase productivity and even promote innovation.

engaging employees

The UK's Department for Work & Pensions, for instance, created an internal crowd-sourcing platform called "Idea Street," which included basic game mechanics like badges and leaderboards. The goal was to encourage its 120,000 employees to share thoughts on possible ways to both improve their day-to-day working lives and enhance how the organization operated, which included the way in which it dealt with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.

Employees were then asked to vote and comment on the ideas before a more formal evaluation of their suitability for implementation took place. A key outcome of the initiative, however, was to boost engagement by making personnel feel more listened to and valued. Within the first 18 months, the project had around 4,000 users and generated 1,400 ideas, 63 of which have been implemented. Due to the success of initiatives of this type, Gartner's Burke believes that by 2015 more than half of organizations that place value on promoting innovation will "gamify" the processes surrounding such activity.

Another example of an organization that has benefited from the introduction of gamification techniques, this time in a staff-productivity context, is a major U.S. retailer. It introduced a competitive time-rating system to encourage checkout staff to ring items through their registers more swiftly.

 The checkout system calculates how quickly and accurately each cashier deals with individual customers and assigns them points based on their performance, while also providing cues if they slip behind the average. Managers, who are able to see a dashboard indicating each employee's performance, then offer rewards to the most productive.

German electronics and engineering giant, Siemens, has also applied gamification concepts in a bid to train large numbers of personnel more effectively than had traditionally been the case with standard e-learning systems.

It worked with a number of companies, including game design firm Pipeworks Software and advertising and design agencies Shaw and Fusion Performance Marketing, to develop "Plantville" in order to help personnel get a clearer handle on its broad range of products and potentially boost cross-selling between its different divisions. The online video game works by requiring users to take three run-down factories and make them meet customer orders more efficiently by redesigning the layout, buying and installing new Siemens equipment and hiring new staff.

But while such an endeavor may sound like an expensive proposition, as Effect's Riley points out, a large outlay is not necessary in most circumstances, particularly as the majority of organizations are unlikely to change how their workforce operates in one fell swoop. Instead the focus is more likely to be on introducing small pilot projects that are initially introduced here and there.

"There's often not really any new technology involved, and it's very much about using existing stuff," Riley says. "It's more about the concepts and execution, with the essence being to make sure something unfolds over time and that it delivers for both parties. That means there's something in it for the user, but it also delivers against business objectives."

set your targets

To get it right, however, requires having a clear idea of what the organization is trying to achieve from the outset rather than simply rushing in because it is seen as the next big thing. Another key consideration is finding ways to measure outcomes and establishing what success looks like in order to ensure a return on investment.

"You need a considered strategy and, whatever you do, it has to sit within the culture of the company. You've also got to ensure that it's relevant to your audience as it has to be applicable. For example, if you want all of your workforce to engage, taking skateboarding as a theme isn't likely to appeal to older sections," Riley says.

As to what the key techniques behind gamification are, Gartners' Brian Burke identifies four. The first, he says, is accelerated feedback cycles in order to maintain motivation and engagement. This contrasts with the situation in the real world, where feedback, for instance in the shape of annual performance appraisals, is often much slower.

The second consideration relates to having clear goals and well-defined rules of play to ensure that users feel in a position to achieve the objectives they have been given. The third must-have, Burke believes, is a compelling narrative to both encourage individuals to participate and hold their interest.

The final thing to think about is ensuring that tasks offer continual challenges that are neither so hard that they are discouraging nor so easy that users lose interest. The ideal, therefore, is to introduce multiple goals into any given system or process that are both short-term and achievable.

But so enamoured is Gartner of the potential for transformation offered by the gamification approach that it was named as one of its top CIO trends of 2011. In fact Burke recommends that IT bosses gain hands-on experience of such techniques as soon as possible, so that they can educate their business colleagues and collaborate with them on evaluating possible opportunities.

"Gamification is set to become an important trend, impacting many areas of business and society," Burke says. "I believe that game mechanics are going to have a huge impact on the way organizations engage stakeholders, innovate and evolve, and we are just on the leading edge of that trend."

article date:
June 13, 2011