Back in 2012, Gartner stated that “by 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives because of poor design.” As the second most-quoted statistic in the gamification industry, it’s important to dive deeper into what was happening then — and what has happened since.

This six-year-old quote considered implementations from 2012. Additionally, it doesn’t take into account the different types of gamification. There’s a massive difference between gamification and enterprise gamification. The gamification industry size is about $6.7 billion, according to Fortune business insights 2019 report. Enterprise gamification contributes to 25% of the overall gamification market — and it’s very successful with products from industry leaders such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

In its Gamification 2020 report, Gartner predicts that the technology, combined with other emerging trends and technologies, will have a significant impact on the following:

    • Innovation
    • The design of employee performance
    • Globalization of higher education
    • Emergence of customer engagement platforms
    • Gamification of personal development.

We don’t think that the gamification vendors audited in this recent Gartner report were industry-specialized vendors. There are many gamification businesses that are general-purpose and don’t understand the context of the industry before they’re put in use. For example, a gamification tool or business that’s focused on customer loyalty — and has great insights on the nuances and culture of the industry — might not necessarily be a great fit for an enterprise-focused contact center.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to successfully implement gamification in your contact center.

  1. Set SMART business goals for your contact center.
    If you want to improve customer service productivity, you should define a SMART goal as such: “I want to improve customer service satisfaction without growing call times within the next month by rewarding employees for quality metrics and improving our core KPIs by 5%.” Without setting the right goal, you could end up fixing a completely wrong problem.
  2. Integrate with your tools.
    Getting the right data coverage and integrating with all the relevant contact center tools is fundamental to designing a great game.
  3. Analyze behaviors and KPI data before you design the game.
    This is the most critical step in improving your contact center productivity. There is a lot of evidence that gamification tools only do gamification — they don’t help in analyzing basic contact center behaviors and stats. Not analyzing the right data or focusing on the right behaviors is a major misstep. You could easily get your team to focus on the wrong things, which means you’d never achieve the gamification goals you set out to reach.
  4. Design games that are unique to your business culture.
    No matter how much data analysis we do, final game design must take into consideration your contact center’s culture. For example, giving $50 reward to employees who consistently take the night shift sounds like a great idea on the surface, but what if that your employees already voluntarily perform that behavior without a reward? Then you’re not only rewarding the wrong behavior, you’re also rewarding something that goes against the culture of your business.
  5. Take into account governance and change management.
    No gamification program can run without proper change management and governance structures. Explaining the benefits clearly to agents, team leaders and management is paramount to the success of any gamification program. Driving weekly and monthly governance meetings to check-in on gamification progress and measuring the engagement to consistently tweak game elements or rewards will yield groundbreaking results.

To learn more about Datagamz patent-pending gamification and analytics solution, attend this on-demand webinar  And sign up for a free trial today to find out how Genesys AppFoundry partner Datagamz leverages both gamification and analytics.

This blog post was co-authored by Kunal Rahalkar. As a CEO at Datagamz, Kunal drew upon his illustrious background in data science and founded Datagamz an enterprise analytics and Gamification company. Kunal is master’s in business information technology from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and acquired rich experience working as a data architect with global businesses such as Accenture, HP and Vodafone. Kunal has over 15 years of experience in building data rich solutions and Datagamz is considered as one of the leading Gamification software businesses round the world and was awarded a Bronze Stevie Award in 2019.