WHAT IS GAMIFICATION?
The Oxford dictionary defines gamification as: “The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service: gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun”.
Simply put, we believe this definition is spot on. Gamification revolves around developing unique new uses for how to implement the fun of gaming into motivation for businesses and other consumers. Whether or not you are a gamer, surely you are familiar with the fun and success of videogames.
Now, imagine bringing the enjoyment of gaming into your business or organization in order to motivate employees to learn new skills, sell more product, or generally just get more enjoyment out of the workday. Gamification does exactly that and the number of uses are only limited by your imagination.
CAN GAMIFICATION STRATEGIES BE APPLIED IN BUSINESS?
Here at Dogu, we have developed SalesScreen to provide gamification solutions for businesses who want to motivate their employees by rewarding them with unique badges, ranks to climb, and experience points (XP) to unlock for achieving assigned tasks.
In the future, we will continue to add even more features which will give managers interesting new ways to reward employees for completing a wide variety of different sales activities. The software is fully customizable and as a result, both managers and employees will find a whole new toolbox available to help them bring more fun, motivation, and sense of progression into the workplace.
Gamification as a Motivational Tool
Regardless of profession or occupation, motivation increases productivity. Happy employees will do more work and will be better representatives of your corporate environment. Many companies spend thousands of dollars creating events to improve morale in the workplace… imagine if there were constant new awards to unlock, unlimited challenges, and new ways to create fun, friendly competition, such as creating a virtual fishing contest or a car race.
For instance, imagine holding a Monday Challenge to start off the work week, giving employees something to look forward to when returning from the weekend. Or, perhaps start the weekend celebration early by having a competition on Friday to see which team can reach a desired sales benchmark first.
By creating a whole new range of motivational tools, SalesScreen increases your companies’ revenue by motivating your salespeople. We want to engage them, to push their limits, and to motivate them to be even more productive.
We don’t believe that people are drones who need to be motivated in the workplace in order to accomplish normal tasks. Instead, we believe that creating challenges, fun competitions, awards, and new achievements will simply provide a new source of increased interest and engagement.
We hope that the reward will not be in the points, badges, or leaderboards, but rather that the true rewards will be in creating a fun, exciting, and interesting workday that recognizes and rewards employees for their contributions. We hope that when a sale shows up on SalesScreen that it will result in smiles, high-fives, and verbal “congratulations” to the employees, giving them the true human connection and acknowledgment that they deserve for a job well done.
Why Focus on Gamification for Business?
Gamification is a relatively new concept, just beginning to gain popularity in 2010 and growing rapidly since, but it is expected to revolutionize the workplace in 2015. This Wall Street Journal article highlights the importance of combining work and play through business gamification. At Dogu, we describe ourselves as a bunch of nerds combining our love of technology with a strong business acumen.
So, creating a software platform that helps businesses grow by increasing morale, revenue, and performance, seemed like a natural fit, especially in such an interesting and rapidly growing market. In fact, Fifty percent of corporate innovations will be ‘gamified’ by the end of 2015, according to Connecticut-based technology research firm Gartner Inc.
We certainly look forward to being a major player in this coming trend and we hope that as more businesses learn about the advantages of implementing gamification in the workplace that they will look to us to help provide expertise, knowledge, experience, and great products.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
The German company BASF once used the slogan: “At BASF, we don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.” That’s very similar to what gamification does. SalesScreen will not sell your product for you, but it will provide a motivational tool to help your sales reps increase revenue and for your managers to easily track progress and performance while also giving them a whole new set of tools to promote growth, learning, friendly competitiveness, and teamwork.
Your CRM’s Best Friend
Additionally, SalesScreen fully integrates into your company’s existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems so that you can track progress while continuing to provide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in a fun, exciting, and rewarding new platform. It can be integrated with your existing software and will keep your sales data automatically synchronized at all times across the two systems. You don’t have to change your existing workflow or double report your sales activities but can still enjoy the powerful motivation tools that SalesScreen has to offer.
This means that you get the best of both worlds: active CRM combined with unique rewards for sales, meeting activities, project completions, and many other goals.
Build Teamwork
SalesScreen gives recognition to your salespeople for the tasks they have completed. We use it here in the office and anytime someone makes a sale, their photo, value of the sale, details of the sale, and other information shows up on live screens for the whole office to see. Additionally, the sales rep’s personal music and other customizations can play on the screen at the same time. So, whether the salesperson is in the UK, USA or Japan, we can track big sales in real time and celebrate appropriately here at the office.
In addition, SalesScreen comes packed with more than 100 badges that are automatically distributed when a special accomplishment is achieved. For instance, there is an “Early Bird” badge unlocked if a sale is made before 9AM, or the “Rapid Fire” badge which is unlocked for completing four sales in one hour.
Gamification will never replace a pat on the back and a real word of encouragement; but by recognizing your reps automatically throughout the entire office when a sale is made or a project is completed, you can boost morale and become an even more fun and vibrant workplace.
Data Visualization
You can also use SalesScreen to track a wide variety of other business-related metrics on screen throughout the day. The software allows you to select as many slides as you wish from our beautiful template collection to build an insightful slideshow for your employees to see.
For example, you can display budget progression, sales forecasts, project countdowns, a company “Wall of Fame”, leader boards, and just about any other sales data you’d like to show up on the screens. For instance, here at Dogu, one of our slides is a “Countdown to Weekend” with a photo of a beach and a surfboard. It’s important to be fun and engaging in the office and our customizable templates will allow you to really show your own unique company personality through data visualization. We like to think of this as the sales whiteboard of the 21st century.
Mobile Apps
As an added bonus, the SalesScreen app is available for both Android and iOS, which means that you can log sales activity, track progress, view sales forecasts, and get updated information and alerts immediately regardless of whether you are in the office. Have you just closed a big sale in London and want the office to know? Simply open the app, log your update, and everyone will receive the information in real-time while your personalized slide appears on screens throughout the office. Or, if someone in the office made a big sale but you are busy traveling, you can receive a push notification on your phone.
Regardless of where you are, SalesScreen fits in your pocket and can be used to send or receive important business-related updates.
WHAT’S NEXT?
We are constantly looking for new ways to provide businesses with unique new motivational tools. We have big plans to create even more new awards for sales reps and also some new features for managers, which will give them even more ways to publicly recognize their employees for performance and activities. Some of these will be available soon and updates will be coming shortly. If you happen to have any ideas for what we could award badges or XP for, or how we could better serve businesses, your comments are always welcome.
Thanks for reading and please check back again soon for the latest updates.
