First, decide what you are going to gamify. It sounds simple, but it is very easy to just decide to use gamification and then not have any idea what you will use it on.

Next, decide why you are going to gamify it. This is a bit harder. A lot of people have it in their minds that gamifying a system will make it better – simple as that. Sadly, it is not a magic bullet. There is a term that floats around those in gamification, Pointsification.  This is what we call a system that has been gamified by purely adding a layer of points, badges and ladders without any thought as to WHY the system is being gamified and HOW to make best use of it.  More often than not this is done to try and improve a system that is badly made in the first place.

Gamification will not make a poorly created system, or an unintuitive interface better. In fact, it will just make the system worse. If that is why you want to gamify something, stop now. Make sure that it is already good in its own right. Rebuild it and include gamification, but don’t try and use gamification to varnish over the cracks.

Once you have the why, it is time for HOW. This is where you need to start thinking about talking to companies that know what they are doing – or employing someone who knows what they are doing. With the best will in the world, you probably don’t know enough to implement this successfully alone!  There are things that you can think about though and I find Badgeville’s three key mechanics handy here. Game Mechanics, Reputation Mechanics and Social Mechanics.

Game mechanics or elements are important, these are the bits that are generally most visible. They are things like feedback, rewards, challenges and the like. Whilst these can be superficial, used in the right way they can really help in the early stages of system adoption and also keep certain types of user engaged. They have to be used with care though.

Reputation mechanics focus on how you can use the actions of your users to promote them within the system. So for instance on Stack Exchange as a person answers more questions, they earn greater status within the site. Greater status can not only lead to respect from other users but could be used to give those users extra features and responsibilities within the site.

Social mechanics, in my mind the most overlooked aspect of gamification,  help keep users engaged with your system. They help connect users to people, help them find answers when they need them and much more. Many sites like Facebook and Twitter use the information they have about you to suggest people that may be of interest to you, based on your areas of interest. Take that to an internal site and you have an efficient way of connecting your workforce with people that they may never have had any access too on the past.

Finally, set aside a good budget and a realistic amount of time. As I say, there are  professional services out there that can help. There is a cost and it takes time, doing it right is not cheap.  Free solutions provide you with exactly what you paid for!

Companies like Badgeville, PugPharm, Bunchball, and Bigdoor (among others) all offer platforms and experts. Each has its own approach and each has its own benefits. Look around at the solutions out there, see what clients they have and talk to them.

The undeniable definition of loyalty that I’ve used for a while has to do with creating profitable behavior change. While some companies speak in esoteric terms about loyalty, they usually revert to mercenary evaluation methods when it comes time to justify annual budgets.

My quantitative approach was challenged recently by a client who served up its own definition of loyalty based on study, debate, research, and their public brand promises. The definition went like this:

“Create a repeat customer who is an advocate of our brands or products and who will actively recruit new customers through positive word-of-mouth

This advocacy is based on the highest levels of satisfaction, making the customer willing to risk their own character, trustworthiness and overall reputation with no reward beyond expressed appreciation of others”

The definition combines the tangible measures of repeat visit and purchase with referral and recommendation, one of the clear powerhouse marketing trends in the social realm online. It also includes a zinger at the end, implying that the willingness to recommend can be made “with no reward beyond expressed appreciation of others”.

This touches on exactly what game mechanics can bring to energize a loyalty program and why brands should carefully study the possibilities of employing “gamification” to stimulate behavior change on a consistent basis over time while drastically reducing the cost of the rewards needed to get the job done.

The loyalty business case is built on creating incremental profit contributions for a business which outweigh the cost of operating a program or series of campaigns by multiple orders of magnitude. When you dissect the operating budget of most loyalty programs as we know them, you’ll find that approximately 80% of annual expenses incurred are reward cost. Fulfilling points collected and redeemed by members with anything from gift cards, cash back or travel packages, costs money – lots of money.

Every business I’ve been in contact with over the past 2-3 years is seeking to deliver higher value to its customers through a loyalty program at a lower cost of delivery. By definition, a solution that can help to deliver this perceived high value while reducing costs is highly attractive at the least, a silver bullet at the most.

Using game mechanics as a core part of a loyalty program value proposition capitalizes on core aspects of human nature. As a people, we are competitive, we care what others think about us, and we like to finish the things we start. Yes, we’re not all the same, and there are variations of implementing game mechanics that can address a broad spectrum of stimulants to human behavior and trigger people to act.

That action can take the form of signing up for a loyalty program, completing a member profile, referring friends to the program, referring the loyalty sponsor’s brand to friends and family and much more. So far, we’ve seen gamification techniques work well in B2B and enterprise settings. We’ve also seen how game mechanics can increase customer engagement in communities and within specific web environments.

The next phase of evolution in gamification and loyalty will be to witness how the two intersect to create value for consumers, create long term sustainable behavior change and do it all at a lower cost of operation. Just the thought of it makes me want to play the game.

Fortunately the alarm is being sounded to address the sales performance crisis from academia and a growing body of thought leaders in sales training, consulting, and recruiting. There is a significant movement towards integrating the science of technology and analytics with the art of selling from a holistic mindset. Seems like gamifiation across multiple channels is the ideal solution.

In an article from the Harvard Business Review Blog Network entitled, “CEOs Need to Get Serious About Sales,” the message focuses on the importance of analytics and “Building a lean selling machine” that optimizes sales operations with automated tools. CEOs need to champion the “sales as a science” approach and invest 2 to 4 percent of the sales budget to develop analytical tools and teams to monitor trends.

The old idea that Sellers can talk buyers into anything is taking a 180% turn to customer centric selling. When I spoke with John Holland, the co-author of “Customer Centric Selling”, he stressed that sellers need to “close on the buyer’s timeframe” and it is vital to understand human buying behavior. The ability to monitor selling and buying behaviors through analytical tools is at the core of implementing customer centric selling. Mr. Holland is not alone in his philosophy.

In the book “Sales Growth: 5 Proven Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders”, McKinstry’s Jon Vander Arc’s research makes the point that when companies get technology right the results are impressive. He continues by explaining that as digital channels become more complex, IT will be ever more central to outselling the competition.

Change is also emerging from the front end of sales performance. In my interview with SalesForce Search’s CEO, Matthew Cook, I learned how they are using technology to “attract” top talent, are dedicated to improving the skills of their candidates, and providing extended services that help new hires have an immediate impact on quota. At the core of their recruiting innovations is Inbound Marketing across multiple channels to continuously attract top sales talent and the development of advanced online sales training in partnership with an Ivy League university.

The common denominator for sales trainers, business consultants, and recruiters is the utilization of technology across multiple channels to collect buyer data and apply analytics to improve sales performance. These industry thought leaders all support the value of organizations adopting a holistic mindset integrates technologically driven science with the creativity of sales leaders. This holistic approach is a welcome departure from technology solutions developed in silos.

CRM, Sales Force Automation, and other technologies have tended to promote technology / science as THE sales solution. However, without creative “whole-brain” leadership to link technology with sales people and consumers technology has minimal impact. Furthermore, the inherent problem with the various iterations of CRM is the reliance data entry from sales people that is biased and inconsistent.

Sellers need no longer settle for subjective and limited data collection sources. Real-time feedback from the brand’s digital ecosystem of ‘Users’ (as defined in my previous post) can be collected across multiple-channels and made available to everyone in the company with gamification as the hub. The gamified enterprise is the engine to transform behavioral data into timely and relevant customer-facing engagement and create company wide contributions into the sales process.

It’s time to get the word out to thought leaders in the sales industry and CEOs who are getting serious about sales that the gamified enterprise is a vital tool in the movement to solve the sales performance crisis.

The perception about loyalty marketing is that it’s everywhere (ubiquitous is the favored term) and most programs look very much the same in the way members collect points and redeem them for gift cards, merchandise, travel, and the occasional dollar-off certificate. With the loyalty industry operating seemingly in a state of parity, you could conclude that everything that needs be known about loyalty is documented, memorialized, and available for download if you find the right website.

The reality is that a big movement is underway to define customer loyalty and, in the process, determine how program structure should change for them to continue to have relevance with consumers in the future. One root cause of the movement is the perception that the majority of programs that pepper our consumer-driven lives just don’t work.

I have to agree that many programs I run across are head-scratchers, prompting me to ask (as I did in a recent series on my Loyalty Truth blog) “Why Loyalty?”  That question was not about whether the brands we examined should or should not engage their customers with a loyalty program. We’re going to accept that as a given for smart marketers. The question was rhetorical, i.e. we were asking ourselves, “if you’re going to do it that way, is a loyalty program your best option”?

I’ve been involved in two large roundtable discussions on this topic with highly recognizable brands of late, and during the latest meeting, received revelation on the topic. It’s always positive when people at the highest levels of business are asking questions that we have most of the answers to. Everyone wants to know if they “Got Loyalty?” (sorry about the grammar) and, having invested ourselves in the topic to a ridiculous level of detail, it’s a question that we are well prepared to answer.

The answer to the question will be found by answering more questions, specifically these:

1. We know we have loyalty when we’ve found a way to create sustainable behavior change across our principal customer groups, so the question is – what are your objectives and what behaviors do you want to encourage?
2. How will you measure loyalty? Some ask the customer if they’re “satisfied” with their brand, some ask if the customer will “buy again”, and others ask if a customer would recommend us to a friend. The measure you choose to measure loyalty will bias the outcomes of your work and may lead you to rely on perceptions that are not reflective of reality.
3. Do you realize that customers (insert people here) have a tendency to say one thing and do another? If your parents ever instructed you with the remark that “actions speak louder than words”, you can hopefully understand the importance of linking behavioral (transactional) data with the qualitative (survey) data we collect.

The outcomes of the two roundtable discussions I mentioned were quite different, reflecting the very different objectives from each group. Participating in these discussions connected me more closely with a sense of urgency that the sooner we change the reality of today’s loyalty programs, the more the perception of loyalty will improve with both consumers and brands.

I get this question all the time from – well just about everyone: end users, executives, consultants, systems integrators, and even other analysts. I use three answers: Yes, No, and Depends. After all, I am an analyst and depends is always the right answer, right?

Let’s start with the first answer, yes.

Gamification is for real. Leveraging gaming mechanics to influence and entice behavior is something that has been around for quite some time now. Although initially called Behavioral Economics, and it studied how to influence behavior with financial consequences – like buying something, the concept gained new strength in the past 20 years or so when we found out that using gaming mechanics it was far easier to influence behavior than through manipulation and deception (the preferred methods until then). These past two decades brought about a lot of research about the discipline we call Gamification – including a few pioneers and trailblazers that applied the concept to business situations, and got decent results. That was the birth of what we today call Gamification – a term that nay three years ago did not exist or even entered the enterprise.

Second answer, no.

Gamification is defined by Wikipedia as the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. In that definition, and looking at implementations of Gamification we have seen so far, it is not for Real. We would love for it to be for real – to leverage gaming techniques and thinking to affect non-gaming issues – but we cannot.

We focus so much on gaming applications and gaming theory and dynamics that we forget the follow-up: how to measure and track, how to make sure that the results from the gaming applications we implement have business value. We lack the right designers and techniques and we don’t event understand the tools and frameworks. We are also missing purposefully-designed platforms, integrated data models and databases, and the infrastructure to make sure we can implement, measure, track, analyze, understand, and report on the successes that gamification provides. While the reporting and the work done with gaming applications is real and has repercussions – we are unable to track them fully for lack of infrastructure, technology and data flows to understand the business value, hot is affects the outcomes, and how to leverage the lessons learned better.

Final answer, and my favorite, it depends.

This is the answer I use most every day when people ask for an honest opinion on Gamification; all others get the above answers depending on where they are coming from and what their agendas are. I truly think that the existence of Gamification varies based on the value the inquirer wants to assign to Gamification. If someone asks me about it and their slant or bias is towards Gamification solving all their problems, being easy to do, and merely consisting of gaming application I tell them that in spite of what they might’ve heard, Gamification is not real, it is just a bunch of games to bring people to a web site but no more than that. I also say that those games are cute and fun but provide no business value whatsoever and that the occasional sale that may be sparked by accident is not a justification for Gamification. I end the “rant” with a spirited discussion on the business value that gamification can bring, and how they should be open to a different way to do it – and how in that case, it would become real.

Those that ask with a keen interest in how they can leverage core components of gaming dynamics to bring people to the site or the event, then use behavioral economics to understand the cause and effect of what they did, and end up looking for easy to measure and correlate to business KPI or strategies, then I regale them with my view of using Gamification to drive or enhance business value. We then proceed to have a discussion not of what Gamification is, but how it can become an effective tool, among others, in driving a business strategy forward and measuring the success of the business. We end discussion how implementing a good gamification strategy for an organizations results in measurable, as-intended actions with goals, objectives and results.

Your turn, what group are you in? Are you hyping gamification as a solution while looking at games? Or are you looking at Gamification as a potential tool in your arsenal to make your business better?
Well?

As we are still in a very early stage with gamification in the enterprise, regard them as inspiration for your own approaches. After each example there is a link with more detailed information, including screenshots of the applications. Enough said, let’s dive in:

SAP Software
SAP Vampire Hunt is a fun mobile application that allows employees to hunt “energy suckers.” One player can invite to a hunt – let’s say “This Thursday a noon we meet on the 5th floor to go vampire hunting” – and colleagues can sign up and take pictures of old light bulbs, old surge protectors, and other devices that drain energy when not being used with their smart phones and report that to facility. The players earn points through the kilowatt-hours that they saved the company, and learn about energy saving measures while meeting new people.

Read more about SAP Vampire Hunt.

Internal- & external-facing processes/systems/applications
The SAP Community Network is SAP’s professional community, where SAP customers, partners and employees share information, ask and answer questions, and create FAQs for the several hundred topic areas. The interactions reward the more than two million members with points and badges. Collecting points exposes experts and they are ranked in the optic specific leaderboards. Top contributors are also offered to become forum, blog and wiki moderators or even asked to become SAP mentors.

Read more about the SAP Community Network.
Read more about gamified communities.

Training & Education
SAP Roadwarrior is a sales negotiation simulation that supports SAP sales representatives to stay up-to-date with the newest products and services around SAP’s mobile technologies and applications. Because of the dynamic of the mobile market, sales reps struggle with acquiring the latest knowledge. By putting sales reps into a simulated sales negotiation with a fictitious customer and answering questions, the players playfully learn about SAP’s newest technologies and apps, the mobile challenges that customers from a variety of industries face, all while competing in a friendly way with other sales reps. Since end of 2011 this simulation has been played by several hundred SAP sales reps and gotten lots of positive feedback.

Read more about SAP Roadwarrior.

Human Capital Management
What if companies regarded employees with the eyes of venture capitalists? We listen to their pitch, look at their “business model”, and estimate their future? And in return employees look at venture capitalists if they not only invest in us, but also help us connect and with guidance? This is the idea behind the Venture Capital Model of Talent Management, where a hiring manager “invests” in a new employee and helps building up the value of this resource by connecting, training and mentoring him or her. Through a “stock portfolio” that hiring and supervising managers receive on the employee, managers will be evaluated by the value that a new employee adds to the company and how managers increase the value of existing employees. Instead of blocking transfers to other units, saving on training, and  “forgetting” promotions, managers will be encouraged and rewarded to take care of the company’s most precious resources: the employees.

Read more about Talent Management.

Marketing & Branding
The mobile application Paul the Octopus (available on the iTunes-store) – named after the famous octopus from Sea Life Center in Germany that predicted with 100% accuracy the outcome of the past soccer world cup games – engages users by asking the to predict which team in the UEFA Champions League will win the upcoming matches. Thanks to the wisdom of the crowd, the prediction of the winning teams may be as accurate as well. Beside that, trivia quizzes and games played against your friends are part of the app as well.
SAP is promoting its product in a subtle way. By having it handle the crowd-generated data and using it to analyze and predict the outcomes. HANA – that’s the name of the product – is an analytical technology, that keeps all the data all the time in memory and allows unprecedented speeds to analyse data and calculate predictions.

Read more about Paul the Octopus.

Event/Workshop/Conference Games
The SAP Knowledge Quest was a scavenger hunt that was played at the SAP TechEd in Las Vegas in 2011. Nearly nine hundred of the more than six thousand attendees formed teams and collected points by visiting booths, finding clues and answering questions and doing all types of silly things for a chance to win some grand prizes and achieving the over all goal of one million points. Reaching this goal meant that SAP donated $20,000 for a charity.
With the help of The Go Game my colleague Julie Barrier planned and organized the scavenger hunt and created a blast amongst the participants.

Read more about SAP Knowledge Quest.

Innovation Games
Overcoming status, cultural, or ideological biases is important in coming to (fact-based) decisions.  To avoid having the highest ranking person in the room dominating the decision finding process, or the strive for group harmony influence the prioritization of product features, or letting political ideology purposely ignore facts is what innovation games help to overcome by moving the elephant out of the room. That’s what SAP has been using to improve team work and decision finding processes.

Read more about Innovation Games.

Summary
These were only a handful of examples that SAP has designed, prototyped and built. It has become clear that gamification is not just a ridiculous fad that hopefully will go away soon, but that we have reached the tipping point and that this concept has been broadly embraced at SAP. Colleagues are eagerly learning and applying game design techniques, game mechanics and fun into SAP business software and many aspects that touch SAP. Follow SAP and how SAP is leading the enterprise gamification movement.

If you are interested in more examples and specific challenges of gamification in an enterprise context, make sure to follow these websites:

• www.gamifiedenterprise.com
• Enterprise-Gamification.com
• Gamification Community

Still, in corporate training, some of these experiences can be dry to say the least. They try to push as much information at you in as short a time as possible. Most humans are not wired to learn in this way. This is increasingly true of the current generation who are at school. They are used to learning in small chunks, using a method know as Information Cascade.

Taking video games as an example here, most come with a very, very basic manual. Rather than the user having to revise the manual for hours before being able to play the game, they are dropped straight into a tutorial level. The player is then given just enough information to get to the next level. On the next level, they are shown a bit more and so on. Eventually, after about 15 minutes, they have all of the knowledge they need to enter the game properly.

Using this spoon-fed approach they have mastered the controls in far less time than it would have taken if they had to keep referencing the manual every few minutes. More importantly, because they were “learning on the job”, they retain the information far more than if they had just read the manual. Most people tend to learn more effectively by doing.

One very good example of how this kind of learning is being used can be seen in Microsoft’s “Ribbon Hero 2″. This is an add-in for Microsoft’s Office 2007 and 2010 suite of tools. The premise sees the player taking control of the legendary paper clip “Clippy”. He must travel through time, solving office related tasks. Each task has you using some feature of Office to gain experience points and of course expertise in the feature. As you use more features, more levels are opened up to you and more tasks. This way you are being encouraged to try features of Office that you may never have considered in the past. I for one have found it to be a fun way of learning more about Office.

This can be applied to most online learning. They key is to make the “game” aspect engaging rather than patronising. As with all gamification, the idea is to improve the experience in some way. If all you do is add cute graphics or animations, then you most likely are going to increase the time it takes to complete the exercise without actually making it more interactive and engaging. If these gamified elements have no meaning, then they just get in the way, thus defeating the object.

A great tool to use when looking at this sort of gamification is to ask yourself one question – “Would I enjoy doing this”. If you have taken a 10 minute learning object and made it into a 30 minute epic that users will lose interest in after the first 5 minutes, you have failed.

Now, the flip side of this is that when you get it right, when the experience is enhanced, engaging and even fun, users will not only remember the lessons, they may even thank you.
Being playful is an underestimated way of making people more open to learning.

While there had been individual approaches before that, we never went beyond research or experienced more in terms of recognition. In 2010 when we started experimenting with gamification techniques, search engines returned approximately 400-500 search results for the term “gamification.” In all honesty, we were not even sure, if gamification is the term or strategy that we were looking for.

Fast forward 2012: the same search engines return several million results for gamification and my community surpassed 500 members, and so has our company’s interest. The topic has taken off – big time!

While I – with a development background – started the SAP–internal community with the goal in mind to learn new tricks in improving the user experience of SAP software, it turned out that colleagues from at least seven areas showed interest in gamification as well. These were colleagues from:

1. SAP Software / User Experience
2. Internal- & external-facing processes/systems/applications
3. Training & Education
4. Human Capital Management
5. Marketing & Branding
6. Event/Workshop/Conference Games
7. Innovation Games

While that may not be the most comprehensive or scientific categorization (with overlapping categories), that is what I have been using to cluster gamification topics. In addition the motivations for my colleagues was diverse as well. Engaging users, improving data quality, creating more buzz, increase adoption, make training material stickier, reduce admin-workload, increase revenue, and many more reasons were named. In the end it’s not so easy to put the reason for looking at gamification in a big corporation like SAP into one catchy phrase.

During the past 2 years I was able to host multiple gamification events with participants from SAP’s customers, partners and employees, supported by Badgeville (Gamification Cups in Palo Alto, Israel, Shanghai and Las Vegas). As a result of these events and my talks with many SAP teams around the world, I collected a list of over 100 enterprise gamification examples that SAP has come upt with. Sure, many of them are nothing else then concepts and ideas, but more than half of them surpassed the UI mockup stage to become prototypes and a surprising number turned into products (either used SAP internally or even externally).

In my next post, I will share for each category one of these examples with you. Stay tuned and be sure to comment if you like this article!

Gamified Applications
What is a Gamified Application? Simply put – a game. Any organization can inexpensively use games to help them complete an action. They hire a game developer, buy one of the many game development products out there, or just get one of their developers to use Flash or AJAX or some other web-based or mobile-based scripting tool to write a game. We have all seen these, often they are used to introduce a new product or concept, or to let users know about a new service. Airlines are very keen to use Gamified Applications when they introduce new routes to “exotic” destinations, online portals use them to extoll the virtues of their portals and many widgets, and virtually all brands have used them at one time or another to collect “leads” and prospect information.

Gamified applications are games that have a very specific purpose, collect information or present news or another simple action, but that are not connected to any other system in the organization. They produce basic usage and demographic data, and they are hard to integrate into other datasets for much more than verification. The lack of integration will always make the ability to track actions and behaviors irrelevant in real-time and not very useful historically.

In addition to the lack of integration, Gamified Applications are simple games or applications that leverage the gaming mechanics extensively, but fail to use behavioral economics or any other behavior modification techniques to do more than the simple task (inform, or collect) that they were designed to do. Further, the lack of integration also provides weak relatable data (data that can be related to existing data on customers or prospects) since there is no easy way to verify a relationship between the new and existing data without a real-time connection.

Gamification Platform
In contrast, a Gamification Platform is all about the integration between the games, the behaviors it tries to entice or modify, and the existing enterprise systems. Platforms have two purposes: leverage behavioral economics to understand, entice, or “coerce” a behavior and to take the data or analysis generated from the usage and gaming and insert it into the enterprise systems, analyze it to generate insights, or augment existing segmentation, profiling, or execution databases with it.

A Gamification Platform is not just about the gaming mechanics,much like Gamified Applications are, but rather about generating value for the business from the games and behaviors. The integration with the systems is crucial for that, as gamers can be verified, their information extended and integrated, but more importantly because the behavior can then be measured per the KPIs the organization is using to run their business. This level of integration, down to the essential metrics, allows the games created in a platform to become part of the business strategy, as opposed to just a game.

In addition to this integration, the Gamification Platform (see picture) has analytics that it can use to make real-time adjustments to gaming strategies based on usage, determine patterns that can change actions and spot potential issues for the organization, and generate insights that the organization can then leverage to improve their behavior modification strategies.

Finally, a gamification platform can also leverage historical information about the user, their usage, and even their reputation over time (which has been tracked in different systems existing in the enterprise). The use of reputation and historical tracking is what makes the gamification platform truly valuable as the games can then be tailored to entice or modify different behaviors in real-time based on the user’s collected data. This is a very powerful, real-time, dynamic use of gaming mechanics to establish better relationships with customers. Customized information from the corporate systems can be entwined with the games so they can be better focused in specific needs of the customer and the organization.

The Roles They Play
Even though I am in favor of platforms over applications, this is not to say there is no value in Gamified Applications. It is incredibly hard for any organization to go from no gamification awareness to implement and leverage the value of a platform on day-one. The true value comes from finding a solution where you can deploy an application-like experience to start, but not limit yourself in the long term should you want to grow your program and connect it across your broader experiences.

I have seen more than one organization make the selection of a Gamification Platform only to use it, initially, to generate games and just leverage the gaming mechanics initially. At least, until they feel more comfortable with the integration capabilities and advanced concepts of the platform. Some of them even continue to use the platform just to produce games and forego the integration, but they extend over time to leverage the historical analytics information that the platform can product.

Either way, Gamified Applications is the easiest and fastest way for organizations to take on Gamification for their applications. However, for long-term business value of using Gamification, the platform model is the way to go.

Are you using a platform or an application? What are you seeing and experiencing?

In his recent book entitled “Users; Not Customers,” Aaron Shapiro the CEO of Huge, explains why “today’s most powerful growth engine” is — not Customers — but “the people who interact with your company through digital media and technology, even if they have never spent a dime” – your Users. Who are these Users and how does your company connect to, and engage with them?

As defined by Mr. Shapiro, Users include customers, employees, job candidates, business prospects and partners, brand fans, members of media and other influencers. This is quite a diverse group with different interests and needs related to your product or service category and your brand. In addition to their diversity, Users want the option to engage with your brand through a mix of channels that include your Website, Intranet, Mobile Apps and Social Media. Tapping into this complex “growth engine” requires a strategy that values the power of engaging with, and learning from your Users.

The Learning Mindset Starts at the Top

Today’s typical CEO might still be reserved about investing in a technology platform to facilitate two-way conversations and openness with customers, employees, and business partners; however, CEO attitudes are changing at a fast pace.

According to a recent IBM global study of 1,709 CEOs, social media will jump from last to the #2 spot in the hierarchy of preferred customer interaction methods within the next three-to-five years. Interestingly, the study also highlighted that 57% of the companies among the top 20% in terms of revenue and growth “have access to and draw insights from data” and can “translate their insights into action”. According to one CEO participant; “increasingly you have to be open to data, and you have to be able to access it”. Finally, the study revealed that coinciding with the trend of CEOs placing greater importance on data learning is the “push toward prioritizing more measurable communications channels with customers”.

As CEO and business development specialist, my attraction to gamification has always been about learning from the data; very rich data. Regardless of the User participant, game mechanics with motivational drivers like rewards, status, self-expression and so on, generates greater depth and richness of behavioral data through progressive User engagement. Compared to web analytics, gamification captures User behavioral data that is more relevant and dynamic, not static. Businesses need an enterprise level platform to collect, integrate, and aggregate behavioral data from multiple digital channels to tap into “today’s most powerful growth engine” – their Users.

Based on the IBM Global CEO survey, as well as a growing volume of academic and business publications, CEOs and their executive leadership teams are placing higher value on access to (User) data. I think a key to gaining greater adoption of gamification is to focus the conversation with the CEO on learning from very rich behavioral data. With the right strategic planning, starting at the top, gamification across the enterprise will grow in acceptance because it will help generate new insights, define and refine strategies, stimulate innovation and guide short-term adjustments to capitalize on opportunity and stay ahead of the competition.