Published on the 15/04/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Technology analyst Gartner has again warned enterprises that while gamification holds enormous promise most current attempts to sway employee or customer behaviour are just a waste of money…
Two years ago Gartner warned that about 80 percent of attempts to gamify employee or consumer behaviour would fail by 2014; it seems no-one was listening.
Research vice president Brian Burke recently launched his book Gamify – how gamification motivates people to do extraordinary things noting that most organisations still aren’t getting it right.
“Organisations should use gamification to empower their customers, employees and communities to reach their goals. Gamification is about motivating people to achieve their own goals, not the organisation’s goals,” according to Burke, who added that the real sweet spot surfaced when gamification delivered benefits to consumers or employees and the organisation alike.
In essence, gamification provides rewards of some sort for encouraging a specific sort of behaviour by an employee or consumer.
Dr Jason Fox, an Australian motivation strategy and design expert, said that the most successful gamification deployments, “are those that help customers do what they want to do or improve staff processes”.
Airlines and retailers have long used gamification in their loyalty and rewards programmes, but there are increasingly subtle deployments now taking place. The Commonwealth Bank’s Investorville – a game that lets people play “what if” with the property market – for example attracted 23,000 users in its first nine months, 12 percent of whom went onto to visit the CBA’s home loans web page.
There are however a number of more obvious attempts to steer behaviour. In an approach that Jason Fox describes as “advergaming” People’s Choice Credit Union last month launched a smartphone app that rewards weekly winners of a game with cash prizes. The organisation says that 75 people a day are downloading the app which is part of a campaign to get people to sign up for an online account – but the prize winning campaign lasts just six weeks – a relatively short period in which to change consumer behavior.
Gartner’s Brian Burke says genuine success will come from more calculated and strategic approaches which bring together C-suite executives and technologists to determine what optimal behaviour should be encouraged, and the means by which that can be achieved by delivering some form of emotional engagement.
