What is it?
According to Wikipedia, “Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems. Gamification is used in applications and processes to improve user engagement, return on investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning.”
How does gamification work?
The concept of gamification goes back to the first level of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers, which motivated users to play the game and move from one level to another, earning points on their way. Gamification challenges people, provides a medium to express their creativity thereby bringing in elements of motivation, retention, loyalty and above all, a sense of achievement!
“Challenge + achievement = Pleasure”
…is a simple formula behind the huge success of gaming in general. No other medium is able to deliver the same results, at such frequency, leading to addictive behavior. It makes people want to do it again and again, over and over!
Now imagine if this were to be used at the workplace…or as a medium to improve your business!!
It is no wonder then that Gartner estimates by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. By 2014, Gartner predicts that over 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one "gamified" application, and that "gamification is positioned to become a significant trend in the next five years." M2 Research reports that gamification will be a $2.8B industry by 2016. (Source: gamification.org)
Enterprise Gamification
Enterprises – large and small use gamification today in a number of innovative ways: in enhancing employee engagement initiatives, employee motivation, talent development, training and improving business performance by socially recognizing and thus leveraging progress. It is said that businesses applying gamification in their processes can increase their employees’ ability to learn new skills by 40%.
How Torry Harris gamified the training process for ‘Customer Service Representatives’ of a large Telco?
Torry Harris was asked to reduce the training time, cost and effort for one of the training processes of a large telecom client. It had “gamification” written all over it! The client had just moved from one Incident Management System to another. This migration gave rise to three key challenges:
- The Customer Service Representatives had to unlearn the old system and relearn the new one
- That meant a huge learning curve
- Time and budget were short
The Center of Excellence (CoE) team at Torry Harris decided to gamify the entire process using formal principles, and introduced both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation techniques, to encourage people to learn the new system. A virtual game environment was created with a secret agent being assigned to solve a bank robbery crime. The CSR agent would don the character of the secret agent while playing the game. The game then guided the user through a series of missions that were linked to specific learning objectives.
As against reading through 50 PDF documents, the game made the whole learning process more fun, simple and effective with super-engaged CSRs! It allowed employees to emotionally connect with their objectives. By creating a fantasy environment, with a series of challenges; the users were increasingly motivated to progress through each level and complete them. They were also able to compete with each other through a score-board, to make it a competitive learning experience.
You can also check an interesting article on the best gaming modems on the market.
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In today’s context, with increasingly complex interactions and digital human touch-points, unless all faculties of design thinking are applied with full competence, we might fall short of solutions that address a customer need and how someone would want to use something on an ongoing basis (marketplace), both at the emotional and functional levels.
Gamification is the use of game techniques in non-game situations to drive/motivate people. This infographic shows how gamification can help enterprises.
Businesses have been dismissing gamification as a “fad”, and criticizing the use of game principles at the workplace. However, a deep dive thesis and some implementations and studies later, gamification is seen to be producing very tangible results in areas of user engagement, customer retention, RoI, learning etc. and is no more considered a marketing gimmick.
Whitepaper
Analyst Speak
(THIS) has been cited among notable vendors by Forrester Research in its report ‘The API Management Software Landscape, Q1 2024’. The report recognizes Torry Harris as a provider offering API management solutions with a geographic focus in the EMEA & APAC regions.
Forrester observes that the initial rush to “lift and shift” to the cloud has now been replaced by a focus on modernization and digital transformation. Cloud migration is the first step in a long journey to take advantage of the latest cloud-native technologies and services.
Torry Harris is a 'Strong Performer' in The Q3 2022 Forrester Wave™ for API Management Solutions. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps technology architecture and delivery (TAD) professionals select the right one for their needs.