Most of us are familiar with the leaderboards, badges and special missions that video games use to keep players engaged. What many people don’t realize is that the same basic tools can be adapted to boost engagement in business settings.
Gamification is becoming an increasingly popular approach to boosting engagement with customers or employees. By turning desired actions into games, businesses can encourage website visitors or current customers to engage with your online content. Gamification can also be a powerful employee engagement tool.
There are a number of ways to integrate gamification into your business practices. Each gamification software uses game mechanics to help businesses meet specific objectives. This article will take you through the top gamification software options that can be used to boost sales, customer engagement or employee performance.
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What is gamification software?
Gamification software utilizes game mechanics to incentivize customers or employees to perform certain actions. This can include completing challenges or tasks to earn points or badges. Gamification is also used to encourage customers or employees to engage with specific content. It can be used to create a sense of achievement or cultivate a healthy competition among users. Gamification tools can increase sales, boost customer loyalty, improve employee engagement and manage employee performance.
Uses of gamification software
While many software categories are designed with a specific business use in mind, gamification software is a border category that can be used to accomplish a number of different uses or goals.
Customer retention and growth
Gamification allows businesses to go beyond the basic customer loyalty programs to continuously engage customers. Customers may be offered rewards and discounts for leaving a review, making repeat purchases, engaging with the brand on social media or other desired activities.
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The key is to keep your business at the forefront of your customers’ minds so that they come back to you next time they need to make a purchase. It can also encourage word-of-mouth lead generation by incentivizing social posts or customer referrals.
Sales
Due to the nature of the job role, gamification is an especially good fit for sales teams. Gamification can tap into the competitive nature of your sales team to encourage them to compete, exceed their targets and move up the leaderboard. Gamification is great for hosting sales contests around new product launches, peak sales periods or quarterly initiatives.
Learning Management
Gamification can be used to improve and track completion of customer and employee training modules. By gamifying learning management, employers can encourage participation in learning activities and encourage participants to do their best on any module quizzes to move up the leaderboard.
HR and Employee Engagement
Gamification can be used to motivate, engage and reward employees. Employers can use it to encourage employees to work towards goals, improve productivity or engage with company content. By linking rewards or public recognition to employee performance, employees can feel more engaged with their jobs and valued by their employers.
Key features of gamification software
Leaderboards
Leaderboards rank participants based on points or achievements. The format is commonly seen in video games, but can also be a great tool for motivating employees. Companies can increase competition among sales staff, recruiters or other outcome-focused teams by publishing a leaderboard with the top performers. Leaderboards can also be published to track external parties such as customers that attend a virtual event hosted by your company or participants in a customer-oriented competition.
Goal Tracking
Many gamification software platforms include goal tracking. Goal tracking can be displayed with progress bars, virtual maps or other dashboard tools. These tools allow both the participant and the company to track performance in relation to set goals. Sometimes these are general goals set for all employees or customers. However, they are often more personalized and customizable when intended for use with internal teams or employees. Goal tracking features often aid in employee performance management.
Badges
Badges can be awarded within many gamification software platforms. These badges recognize employees or customers for their achievements such as meeting a goal or completing a challenge. They can be displayed publicly in a social news feed or on a user’s profile to act as a public recognition tool.
Rewards
In most gamification systems, participants can earn points by completing activities. Sometimes these points are simply used to advance to a higher level, earn a badge or move up the leaderboard. However, many gamification software platforms offer users a way to spend their points for rewards such as giftcards or prizes defined by the company. Rewards features incentivize employees to earn points and actively participate in the game.
Social features
Many gamification software tools also incorporate social elements. This can come in the form of a social news feed that allows other users to view activities such as points earned or goals completed by other participants. They may also include user comments or employee recognition. Some more advanced gamification tools also engage customers in forums or other social activities to create ongoing conversation around the brand.
Reporting
Like most software tools, gamification software typically includes reporting and analytics tools. These features allow businesses to track the impact of gamification by showcasing data on employee performance, completion rates and scores for learning modules, or the ROI of gamified customer loyalty or advocacy programs.
Most popular gamification software vendors
Here are the top gamification software vendors of 2022, curated based on popularity, customer reviews and features.
Engagedly
Engagedly is an HR-focused gamification software. If your goal is to leverage gamification software for employee management, this might be the right software for you. It includes features centered around performance management and employee engagement. With Engagedly, businesses can gamify certain behaviors that they would like their employees to continue.
Some of the most notable features include 360-degree feedback tools, goal management and real-time manager feedback. Engagedly also offers add-ons that can support team collaboration, learning management, employee surveys, feedback collection and rewards.
One great thing about Engagedly is that it can be used to foster more transparent communication around employee performance. Employees can view progress bars to see how they are doing at working towards their set performance goals. Ongoing performance management is more effective for engaging your employees and improving performance than a single annual performance review.
Engaging is also a great tool for keeping employees motivated. Employers can complete tasks to earn points of badges. This can include things like sharing or commenting on the company’s social posts, referring a customer or applicant or more job-specific tasks.
Some employees may not care about earning badges or moving up a leaderboard, but Engagedly does offer a way to add some extra motivation. The platform features a giftcard catalog where employees can trade their points in for a giftcard of their choice from the catalog. Businesses can also create custom rewards that can be purchased with points earned through the gamification system.
Influitive
Influitive gamifies advocacy and engagement for your brand’s customers. It gamifies customer advocacy including online reviews, customer referrals, webinar or virtual event attendance, customer survey completion and more.
In Influitive’s gamification software, businesses can reward customers for every action that they take to promote or engage with the company. Gamifying the customer advocacy process is a great way to generate positive reviews and word-of-mouth. A common issue with online reviews is that people are more likely to remember to leave a review if they’ve had a bad experience than if they’ve had a good one. Therefore a business or product with thousands of happy customers and only a couple dissatisfied ones may end up with low reviews on popular review sites like Yelp. By gamifying the process, you can remind and incentivize the happy customer to leave honest positive reviews.
Influitive also provides detailed reporting so that businesses can easily evaluate the success of their customer advocacy programs. This is helpful for identifying where gamification is working and where stronger incentives may need to be offered to encourage customers to take action. Businesses can also see which customers are generating the most revenue for the business.
Spinify
Spinify is a gamification software designed to motivate your sales team. It utilizes leaderboards, competitions and employee recognition tools to motivate sales teams to hit their goals. Progress towards goals can be tracked and presented in real-time for added visibility.
Many of Spinify’s features are targeted towards larger team projects and competitions, but employers also have the option to set personalized goals and KPIs for staff members. Employees that top the leaderboard or achieve their set goals can also unlock set achievements to help employers recognize their hard work.
Trivie
Trivie is a gamification learning software that can be used to support employee training and development. The platform can measure, manage and enhance knowledge on work-related topics such as product knowledge, safety and compliance guidelines and customer service skills. The platform can also be used to gamify employee onboarding. Employees can earn badges for completing trainings and move up the leaderboard for scoring highly on retention quizzes.
The platform uses AI-based learning techniques to improve knowledge retention. The proprietary AI system creates a personalized proficiency map for each employee to forecast their current knowledge gaps and when they’ll need a refresher on what they’ve learned.
Before the forecasted date, the employee will be assigned a booster assessment on the topic to refresh and reinforce their knowledge.
The platform also provides an easy-to-use reporting dashboard to help employers track learning progress and achievements. Employers receive recommendations on how to adjust the trainings and improve engagement.
Bunchball Nitro
Bunchball Nitro is a gamification software designed for enterprise businesses. It leverages gamification features such as missions, points, badges and leaderboards to increase performance across the different areas of the business. The software can be used to incorporate gamification in a company’s sales strategy, employee management practices, partnerships and customer outreach. This makes it one of the most robust and versatile gamification software options.
It can be used to drive traffic to a company’s blog posts, website or social media posts through customer-facing gamification. Another popular use is to gamify employee onboarding and training. The vendor reports that using the platform’s gamification tools can reduce onboarding time from 4 weeks to 14 hours. Bunchball also offers mobile gamification tools to engage employees and customers from their mobile devices.
Bunchball Nitro integrates with several popular enterprise software tools including Salesforce, SAP SuccessFactors and Jive. As such, Bunchball Nitro is a great choice for enterprise companies that want a gamification solution that will fit into their existing software infrastructure. The software also offers advanced reporting features to segment data across different initiatives and review the performance of gamification efforts.
Hoopla
Hoopla is a gamification software with a focus on employee motivation and communication. It offers automated, real-time motivation and recognition to keep employees going. Companies can create sales contests tailored towards office, in-store or remote employees with results tracked on a leaderboard.
Hoopla helps teams recognize and celebrate wins through streaming channels with leaderboards, dashboards, progress bars and more. Data can be automatically gathered from Salesforce, HubSpot or other integrated tools to make goal tracking easier. Hoopla initiates celebrations as soon as an employee reaches a milestone or closes a deal.
Hoopla also includes communication tools so that employers can send notifications to employees to share progress updates, recognize high achievers or deliver some extra motivation. Hoopla can also provide real-time data to sales, customer service, support, marketing teams and HR teams. It provides detailed reporting on employee performance and sales or goal data.
SAP
SAP provides gamification tools in many of their popular software solutions. The vendor supports gamification for sales optimization and learning management.
SAP Sales Cloud one of the leading sales force engagement tools. It uses gamification to train and motivate sales team members to boat revenue and achieve better sales outcomes. This software combines the power of gamification and advanced data reporting to optimize your business’ sales efforts. With performance-focused dashboards, employees and managers can track progress on sales goals.
SAP’s SuccessFactors learning management system also supports gamification to encourage information retention and training completion. More advanced gamification tools like Bunchball Nitro can also be seamlessly integrated into the platform.
LevelEleven
LevelEleven is a gamification software designed to boost employee motivation and productivity through coaching, contests and more. It is targeted toward sales and customer retention teams.
One of the main features of the software is gamified sales contests. Businesses can launch company-wide, team-wide contests or individual contests to motivate employees to meet or exceed their sales goals. Contest participants can be displayed on a leaderboard to publicly recognize top achievers throughout the contest. LevelEleven connects to Salesforce to track sales data. Employers can set custom rewards to motivate employees to try to win the contests. Top performers can also receive badges for accomplishing a goal.
The platform also provides each employee with a performance scorecard. This allows the employee and their manager to track their performance metrics in real-time. This scorecard shows the employee how much progress they have made on their performance goals and where they rank among their teammates. Managers can also provide feedback through the portal based on these daily scorecards to facilitate ongoing coaching and employee development. Based on these conversations, the manager can assign action items to the employee to help reinforce the coaching sessions.
Choosing the best gamification software
When choosing the best gamification software option for your business, it is important to consider how you intend to use the software. Gamification can be used by several different departments to accomplish different goals.
Customer-oriented gamification tools are a great way to turn your loyal customers into brand advocates. Businesses can also take a different approach and use gamification to drive sales and customer retention by creating competitions or challenges for sales and customer success team members. Most gamification tools are tailored towards a specific business use case, so consider what you hope to get out of gamification before choosing a gamification software.
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