What Gamification Doesn't Do

While gamification is proven time and time again to be successful for many organizations, a study by Gartner still says that by 2014 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objections. This is mostly because of poor design, but there are also additional reasons organizations set up gamification to fail. If you or your organization are seeking gamification for one of the following reasons, you shouldn’t waste your breath, or your money:

Fix Sales Processes

Many organizations seek gamification to either: 1. Increase their internal sales team’s production, or 2. Increase e-commerce. However, if there are underlying issues with your sales team or your product, gamification will have little to no effect. For example, if you have an unhappy sales team being fed old or fraudulent leads, adding some badges to your CRM isn’t going to turn them into sales superstars. However, if your sales team has their good days and their bad days and simply lacks motivation, gamification is worth a try.

If you’re looking for gamification to increase your online sales, consider WHY your online sales are low before investing. If you have very little online traffic to begin with, adding gamification may not be worth investing in because so little people will utilize it. While gamification can increase motivation in order to drive sales, it won’t solve all your problems if there are underlying issues with your sales process.

Fix your Training/Education

If you have defunct training system and materials, gamification will not help you. Whether employees learn from a book, a video, or a gamified platform, if the content you’re supplying isn’t valuable, it does not matter what format they see it in. For example, if you gamify your sales team’s training that’s straight out of a 1984 college textbook, you probably won’t see any better results than you did with video training. Make sure that your training materials are successful independently before you add a leaderboard and some badges.

Succeed on its Own

Once you implement a gamification system, you can’t just expect it to run on its own with little to no management. Gamification is something that everyone in your organization has to be on board with. In addition, if you are not going to monitor your gamification or make changes to your organization based on the trends of gamification, there really is no point. For example, if you notice that customers on your site make more purchases after completing a certain action−like going through a demo, or reading a review, make these features more prominent on your site. Gamification can truly be successful if you use it as a tool to help you make changes in your organization and its processes.

It all comes down to why you are considering implementing gamification in the first place. Before jumping on the gamification bandwagon, get to the root and purpose of why you want the system in the first place. You can’t expect the new kid on the block to solve all of your problems if there are fundamental deep rooted issues within your business.