Where are you going with gamification? Do you need to energise contact centre performance? Maybe drive sales targets? Gamification can get you there. Get off to a good start with these quick tips.
Nail your strategy
Gamification design is about changing behaviour. So it follows that your first step in getting strategy right is to identify and understand the behaviours you’re looking for. And don’t confuse outcomes with behaviours.
You may want to get your sales team more active in using your CRM system. That’s the outcome you want but what does ‘more active’ look like? What specific actions do you want people to take? Maybe record cold calls, log accurate client contact information, post client/prospect industry news, share personal experiences? That’s the level of detail you need to establish performance goals, measures and rewards.
Know your people
Gamification can change behaviour, but you need to understand the people you’re designing for. One popular frame of reference for success is the Fogg Behaviour Model, which suggests there are three main factors underlying any human behaviour: motivation, ability, trigger. Dr Michael Wu has a good blog post on the subject.
So ask yourself: Are your people motivated to perform the behaviour you’re looking for? Do they have the skills, ability and access to everything required to do the job?
What’s the trigger that prompts action? Is there a trigger?
Watch out for unintended consequences
There’s a ‘win at any cost’ character in every crowd, so be sure your gamification system has some built-in stops and barriers to cheating. Set up daily maximums limits for points, social posts, tweets or whatever actions your system is designed to promote. It’s an unfortunate, but real consideration.
Set your timescale, choose your tools
What’s your gamification goal? Instant feedback with points and badges will drive a one-week promotional campaign, but rising through the ranks of a loyalty program is a much longer journey guided by a very different set of gamification tools. There are no shortcuts to rank and reputation. Just be aware that gamification is not a one-size-fits-all fix and different tools produce different results. Know your timescale, choose your tools and plan the experience wisely.
The Incentive Research Foundation offers this helpful illustration in Gamification Done Right – The Do’s and Don’t’s.
Know the effective timescale of your desired behaviour change
“Not all the behaviours you want to drive are intended to last forever. The effective timescale of any behavior change is how long the change in behaviour will last, or at least is intended to last.
Because there are many gamification tools with a wide range of feedback timescales, knowing the effective timescale you want to achieve really comes down to picking the right tool for the job.”
Build a community
If you’re looking at gamification to drive behaviour change over the long-term, you really need a strong community base. As we know from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, community touches our human desires for belonging and esteem. Good gamification design provides a mechanism for the status, access, power, display and peer comparison reflected in real-life community involvement. If it fits your gamification strategy, be assured that community is a powerful force for change.
Work your data
You just couldn’t ask for a better solution to consolidating data from all over the enterprise than a gamification platform. First, you get a full individual, team or department performance profile from your gamification stats. Pull in data from HR, Learning and Development, Sales and whatever other system you need to create a full living-colour of individual, team or department performance. All on one dashboard. Very neat.
