Game On for Gamification

Children play games to learn. For that reason, it makes perfect sense that games can be used to learn in business scenarios, too.

This is proving to be true: Business Insider says that consultancies MarketandMarkets and M2 both put the size of the gamification sector at between $400 million and $500 million by the end of 2013 and that M2 sees the sector reaching a value of $2.8 billion by 2016. Gartner predicts that more than 70 percent of Global 2000 companies will use the gamification strategy by 2014.

Game On: From the fight against cancer to the improvement of the performance of customer service representatives, making a game of it all is proving to be a potent approach. This slideshow highlights creative uses of gamification. Readers viewing all 10 slides get extra points!

Click through for 10 examples of the creative uses of gamification.

Bunchball Nitro is being integrated with the BMC Remedyforce Service Management Suite to be part of the BMC MarketZone program. The goal is to use gamification to improve IT service and support organizations by motivating agents to contribute to the company knowledge base and enabling quicker fulfillment of customer requests.

MetroPCS uses a game similar to The Sims to train new sales clerks before letting them sell to customers.

Contact Center firm LiveOps employs 20,000 work-at-home people who bid against each other for work. The My Work Community agent portal is gamified into missions in which hitting goals and collaborating with other agents helps earns points.

NanoDoc is an online game developed by the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies that helps bioengineers and the public design nanoparticles that treat cancer.

Microsoft technicians looking for software bugs get points for solving problems or translating operating software into any of 36 languages.

Software company Omnicare created a leaderboard for the best customer service reps, who were rewarded with cash. The workers initially felt spied upon, though, leading management to redesign the game around goals that were important to the reps.

PatientPartner designed a 15-minute mobile game in which patients in a waiting room are told a story and given choices about a character’s health. The goal is to get them to take their own medicine. In one clinical study, the game increased self-administration by 37 percent.

El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., used a gamification and social sharing strategy to help employees lose weight. In January, two-thirds of the staff were obese. By late August, more than 1,000 pounds had been lost.

Wikistrat is a consultancy that crowdsources content from consultants, academics, journalists and others. The platform includes a gamification engine in which the experts can win cash in addition to the flat fee the company pays.

InsideSales.com’s PowerStandings Basic is a gamification technology that places sales reps in competition with each other in an interactive environment that is integrated within the Salesforce.com CRM interface.