Kris Duggan

Business gamification uses elements like points, achievements, levels, leaderboards, missions, and contests to drive desired behaviors. All of a sudden, promoting a brand becomes fun for customers, and sharing troubleshooting solutions with fellow consumers is an engaging challenge. Likewise, employees actually enjoy training instead of seeing it as a chore, and they’re motivated to work harder on a day-to-day basis.

If you’ve opted to go the provider route to build your gamification site, the next obvious question is, what provider should you choose? Although gamification is a relatively new industry, there are numerous organizations to choose from. This is by no means an exhaustive list of gamification providers. It’s a growing industry, and new players emerge (and old ones fold) at a breathtaking pace.

Interested in applying gamification to your business? If so, the first thing you need to recognize is gamification is a program, not just a project. You can’t just apply gamification for three months and call it a day; you need to invest in the strategy for the long term. These are the steps involved in developing a gamification program.

In short, yes, gamification works. That being said, gamification is not a panacea for your business woes. If your business or product is lousy, or if you're at the bottom of a dying industry, gamification alone can't save you. People look for value; if your value proposition stinks, gamification won't make it smell like roses.

Using gamification in your business boosts customer loyalty and engagement. But you need to know how to motivate customers to do what you'd like them to by providing the right types of rewards and understanding effective modes of gamification.

The gentle guide framework is designed to help employees complete a process of steps, such as the everyday tasks of their jobs or a specific, process oriented training program for required certifications. With the gamified gentle guide framework, you keep employees task oriented by assigning them a daily mission of objectives.

The company collaborator framework is used internally to help connect problems with solutions. This gamification framework benefits any company that is large enough that the specific skills of each coworker might not be known corporate-wide. Employees in need are directed to experts in the problem they’re experiencing, while employees, developers, and partners who show proficiency in particular areas level-up in those categories of expertise.

If the site you seek to gamify is a customer-facing online community, then odds are the community expert framework will meet your gamification needs. It enables you to establish user reputation hierarchies by highlighting reputable contributors. Community expert frameworks not only encourage quality contributions, it also helps with content filtering, not to mention enabling site visitors to make user-to-user connections.

You’ve decided you want to gamify some aspect of your business to achieve a specific result. Your next step is to determine just how to implement gamification. To aid in this, six various gamification frameworks have been identified. These frameworks provide a path for getting up and running with a gamification program and help accelerate the aim of the program targeted to achieve a specific goal.