September 19, 2013

Evaluating Gamification Options

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Tags: Gamification

Typically, gamification aims to promote interaction and create a more enjoyable experience for either your customers or your employees. Successful gamification makes seemingly mundane tasks more fun and emotionally involving.

What are the benefits of implementing gamification?

Gamification can have a wide range of fantastic results. If implemented correctly, gamification can increase your website traffic, user satisfaction, user engagement, employee productivity and enhance your employee training process.

Gamification Strategy - resizeWhat problems can gamification solve?

A gamified platform can enhance your customer retention, audience engagement, public relations, brand intimacy, influence or inspire employees. It’s important to note though, that gamification has limits. Gamification is by no means a “cure-all” and cannot entirely transform a bad product or poorly managed business.

How to choose a vendor?

If you’ve made it this far and are interested in incorporating gamification into your enterprise, it’s important to know how to effectively select a vendor. There are most definitely a few things that you should define for yourself, before you begin your search.

    1. What’s Your Industry? Before selecting a gamification vendor, it is important to thoroughly understand your industry. It’s a good idea to look at a game developer’s past work and see if their experience matches your business. This could make all the difference in ensuring a gamification platform is a success.
    2. What’s Your Budget? Another facet of the decision making process is selecting a pricing model. Popular gamification pricing models include licensing, usage-based, deliverables, revenue share, and an hourly-rate or flat-rate. Additionally, well-implemented gamification is dynamic and responsive. Although large vendors have advantages of budget and experience, a smaller vendor with fewer clients may be more attentive to designing gameplay.
    3. What’s Your Project Goal? Establishing a list of goals for a gamification platform is essential. If your goals are unclear or convoluted, it may be exceedingly difficult for a game developer to produce meaningful results. Although gamification is powerful, proper preparation is key. So ask yourself, do you want to motivate your employees? Train your employees? Create a customer loyalty program?
    4. Which Features do you need? Figure out what you need in terms of features. Do you want an analytics dashboard so you can measure your results? Or maybe an API, or a platform that you can integrate with your CRM system – The point is, not all gamification companies offer these features. Deciding as early as possible which features are important to you will help tremendously with finding the right solution.

Game pieces - resize
Confusing, right? That’s why TechnologyAdvice offers the Gamification Product Selection Tool to evaluate your needs and recommends relevant software– turning this daunting task into a simple one.

Try it out, and let us know what you think by emailing or commenting below!

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