Gamification Isn’t All About Enterprise
It’s no secret: more businesses are adopting gamification than ever before. But while many of these companies are large enterprises, gamification can work just as well for small businesses and startups.
In fact, the rapidly growing employee-facing aspect of gamification fits perfectly into the unique office culture of startups. Small businesses can also harness gamification to improve customer loyalty with cheaper and more effective reward programs. Marketing divisions as well should view gamification as a huge opportunity to add unique value to campaigns, and give users a more engaging experience.
One of the main reasons small businesses hesitate to explore gamification is the fear that these systems will be expensive, and difficult to introduce. However, the gamification market is becoming more specialized everyday, meaning small business can find affordable, turn-key gamification solutions if they search hard enough.
Actually, they don’t even have to search. We’ve already compiled a list of the top 5 gamification companies for small businesses.
1) OfficeVibe
Keeping employees engaged should be a high priority for any business. But engagement can be a tricky concept: is the goal to make employees happier, more productive, or both? To make the undertaking more difficult, humans are fickle, so the tactic that increases engagement this month may be annoying and repetitive next month. OfficeVibe helps clear up the gray area of engagement with single question surveys that employees take on a weekly basis.
The surveys contain only one question to keep the barrier to completion low, and the frequency is set to once a week so the data stays current and actionable. OfficeVibe also comes equipped with dashboards that present survey results in digestible graphs and charts as well as gamification elements that makes participation more enticing. Results can be segmented by department, enabling an even more specific view of your company’s mood. OfficeVibe makes engagement quantitative, rather than qualitative.
2) Kudos
In an era where attracting talent is paramount to an organization’s success, small businesses and growing companies need a gameplan for keep their employees’ happy. If Officevibe helps engage the office through surveys, Kudos allows organizations to do nearly everything else associated with recognizing and rewarding employees.
Wisely mimicking the set up of popular social media channels, Kudos offers employees and managers a dedicated social media channel they can use to publicly recognize their peers’ hard work. Recognition comes in peer to peer and manager to peer forms, and each time someone’s recognized they receive a certain number of points as decided by the sender.
Kudos also gives you a way to make these points mean something with its rewards feature. Admins can activate different rewards that require different point totals, with the system specifically set up to create gift cards redeemable at restaurants as well as other entertainment venues, though customer rewards can be implemented too.
Like many SaaS systems, Kudos comes in tiered subscription plans, the most expensive of which features human resources functionality. Managers can assign goals and create corresponding badges to awarded when employees meet or exceed said goals.
Kudos has a ton of other functionality, making it more of an engagement operating system as well as a social network for employees.
3) Hull
For businesses with a heavy web presence or a proprietary app, creating an identity management system is an important part of growing your user base. Identity management systems supply businesses with an infrastructure for managing user profiles and gathering behavioral data.
That’s what Hull does for businesses; it helps them construct a unified user profile across all devices. This helps businesses track user actions across websites, social media, and your app. Using data gathered from Hull, businesses can segment users and send targeted push notifications to entice the right behavior.
Hull only requires a user’s email and password for them to sign in, and some users can navigate your app in guest mode. This software also allows for a great deal of customization, with private messaging, comments, likes, votes, followers, credits, and counters all available as social media-esque gamification functionality. Hull even lets businesses contact user segments by email, in-app push notifications, or Facebook notifications.
Hull requires a certain amount of technical expertise, so it’s not for businesses that don’t have any developers. For businesses who do have strong development resources, Hull is less expensive than comparable solutions, and offers a number of compelling features.
4) Ambition
The phrase “If you can’t measure it then you can’t manage it” epitomizes the modern business mindset — particularly from a sales and marketing standpoint. As your organization grows, so will your sales team, creating an urgency to quantitatively track performance in a scalable way.
Branded as a Sales Productivity Suite, Ambition equips you with the means to create meaningful performance metrics while also shifting the work paradigm to feel more like a game. Using the eponymous Ambition Score, which is composed of aggregate performance metrics, this system calculates an employee’s day to day production for your organization. Changes in the Ambition Score over time indicate notable increases in execution or a warning of reductions in output.
To make the software more engaging and collaborative, Ambition can divide employees into fantasy sports style teams and host sales competitions that use cumulative Ambition Scores to choose who wins.
Other gamification elements include a leaderboards specific to job function and department as well as a personalized news feed that congratulates employees on meeting their goals or setting new personal performance benchmarks.
Ambition also offers a great deal more — such as numerous CRM integrations and business intelligence reporting on a revenue level — making it a comprehensive system for motivating your customer-facing teams.
5) Perkville
Perkville is a gamification provider for small businesses that relies on in-person transactions. They supply clients with the means to build loyalty programs, mostly using software that the company already owns. By signing customers up for their loyalty campaign, businesses can track when these customers make purchases through their Point-0f-Sales system and award them points on Perkville. Once customers sign up for Perkville, they can also tell their friends about companies to receive more points.
Of course, these points need to mean something, so businesses can designate rewards in exchange for a certain number of points. Customers can then print out vouchers for these rewards right from Perkville.
Enterprises aren’t the only companies using gamification. With a host of new, affordable solutions, gamification is for small businesses too.
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