Dan Katz, Director, Product Management
Next week, I’ll be moderating a panel at JiveWorld featuring T-Mobile, Pearson and UBM. We’ll be talking about gamification–of course–and the other day, as I was putting the finishing touches on prep work, I caught myself reminiscing about all that’s happened at Bunchball in just a few short years.
It wasn’t all that long ago that people would hear the term “gamification” and jump to conclusions. The automatic assumption was that it had something to do with entertainment or that it was some kind of short-lived tactic for tricking employees into doing things they don't really want to do.
But that’s not gamification at all.
What is it?
Gamification is a data-driven motivation strategy that taps into your employees’ intrinsic motivators, engaging them in activities, content and systems that are meaningful to their productivity and your business success. It’s about inspiring active participation–which is much more powerful than having employees who are passive consumers of content or who perform tasks simply because someone “told them to.” With gamification you can leverage the big data that your employees generate to help you motivate them to perform better and drive a hard ROI.
Leading companies throughout the world are now using gamification to:
- Drive employee development and higher revenue per employee
- Improve talent retention and recruitment
- Accelerate onboarding
- Enhance the customer experience
But even so, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: As much as we talk about what gamification can do, there’s only one thing that truly drives that message home–results.
And at Bunchball, we’ve got plenty of results to share.
Since the company was founded in 2007, we’ve amassed scores of case studies that show how gamification improves business performance in real, tangible ways. That’s where Ryan Sefko from T-Mobile, Kim England from Pearson and Tracy Maurer from UBM come into the story. At the JiveWorld 2014 session, they’ll tell you about why they chose to leverage gamification within their Jive communities, the business improvements they saw and the lessons they learned along the way.
For instance, you’ll hear how T-Mobile used gamification to promote quick adoption of its “T-Community” social business environment. After rewarding customer service and in-store reps when they searched for information, posted new inquiries, answered peer questions and “liked” valuable content, T-Mobile saw:
- 30,000 T-Mobile call center and store employees regularly using the T-Community
- More than 15,000 frontline employees complete a set of self-guided tutorials
- Month-over-month improvement of call resolution rates and customer satisfaction scores
- Widespread employee collaboration resulting in:
- 96% increase in participation
- 583% increase in contributions
- 783% increase in responses
- 31% improvement in customer satisfaction scores
In addition, you’ll have a chance to ask your own questions and get ideas on how gamification can help your community.
If you're headed to JiveWorld 2014, please join us on Tuesday, October 21 at 11:30 am in Gracia 4 … and to make sure you're fully prepared, don't forget to download Bunchball’s free JiveWorld 2014 toolkit.