Gamification, along with its underlying behavioral science, provides a powerful new toolkit to help organizations address their most pressing internal and external challenges. Internally, behavioral science can be applied both to identify expertise and to recognize and quantify performance. Externally, its mechanics can increase engagement frequency and depth while also driving increased advocacy.
Let’s see…performance, expertise, engagement, advocacy — quite the buzzword bingo entry I just put together. As the gamification industry evolves, we must go deeper than buzzwords and identify the impact that these techniques deliver.
Framing Matters
As Solution Architect at Badgeville I help prospects and customers translate the buzzwords above, and their organization’s unique goals, into quantifiable value measurements — and I’ve come to understand that framing matters. A conversation about the value of improved forecasting, or of increased revenues, is entirely different than one about user interactions or engagement.
So let’s talk dollars.
Funnel Everything
The first step in diving deeper into gamification’s potential impact in your organization is to funnel everything. Think first about your overall vision and strategy, outline the underlying goals, and define how you plan to measure your success. You can break down each of these performance metrics into a series of user behaviors.
For example, let’s use a sales organization. Their overall vision may be to define and expand a new market. Goals might include growing revenue and increasing market share. Metrics within these goals might include everything from reaching monthly and quarterly revenue targets to increasing salesperson adoption of CRM tools. Effective gamification requires a strategic planner to think one layer deeper — on the behavior layer. This layer breaks down every performance metric into individual user behaviors. For example, if you’re focused on increasing user engagement, you need to understand what engagement means in your ecosystem. (When I was a social engagement manager, I defined engagement as total user interactions within a given time period. That included a long list of behaviors ranging from visits to new posts, comments, shares, blogs, discussions started, likes, up-votes, and more.)
Digging Deeper: Gamification for CRM
Gamifying sales applications is a hot topic at Badgeville (as exemplified by the recent announcement of Badgeville for the Salesforce Platform). Applying behavioral science to sales teams and sales tools can positively impact many sales goals, including accelerating time-to-productivity, improving sales forecasting accuracy, improving win rates and average deal size, shortening sales cycles, and increasing employee retention rates. I’m going to dig into gamification’s impact on forecasting, a crucial component of any successful sales organization.
Sales forecasting is extremely reliant upon the quality of sales data collected throughout the enterprise. CRM systems, including Salesforce.com, are powerful tools that collect many of these critical data points. But they don’t eliminate the human element, which in practice means sales executives must constantly harass their teams to input all required information in the system. Gamification changes the conversation by guiding users through the steps managers require while also recognizing and rewarding salespeople for correct use of tools. The resulting improvement in sales data quality also drives significant revenue generation and cost savings, because better data leads to better forecasts. And both over-forecasting and under-forecasting are dangerous. Here’s why:
Forecast too high and you lose investment income and generate excessive payroll costs.
For every dollar you misspend staffing up to address a growing market, you lose another opportunity for more successful investments elsewhere. The $1 million you spent on IT infrastructure to handle incoming customer load could have been better spent delivering value in another part of the enterprise (or been invested in safe bonds, if you’re more conservative). Recruiting and hiring employees who aren’t yet needed comes with even greater associated costs. Regardless of where over-forecasting leads you to spend funds, though, you’re wasting money. Gamification minimizes this waste by improving data quality, thus reducing forecasting error.
Forecast too low and you risk customer dissatisfaction and churn.
If your enterprise can’t appropriately identify an incoming wave of customers, you’ll inevitably lose some of them due to an inability to deliver or to general dissatisfaction with the fact that you can’t provide the level of service and attention they deserve. (Some estimate that inability to deliver can result in revenue loss of up to 50% of unanticipated growth.) Again, by improving data quality, behavior management is an essential tool for helping you prepare for such as wave before it crashes on your shore.
Behavior Management Drives Business Results
Behavior management can drive similar results for any enterprise, not just those focused on sales. Every goal is measured by performance data, and every one of those data points comprises user behaviors. Properly designed and implemented gamification is built upon an understanding of user personas and their psychological motivations. So to figure out how gamification will translate into measurable revenue growth and cost savings, think first about the users behind those numbers.