What is Gamification?

Welcome everyone to another episode of the CX Matters podcast. My name is Justin Tippett, CEO of ACXPA, and in this episode, I am joined by a gamification expert, Luke Jamieson. Welcome, Luke. You know, Justin, how’s things? Well, things are great. It’s always great to talk to you, Luke, because, well, if there’s anyone who’s passionate about all things Employee Engagement, gamification, contact centre optimisation, etc., you are the man. So, in this podcast, we were just going to focus on gamification because it’s a term we often hear a lot in the industry, but I suspect there’s maybe a little bit of confusion around what really is gamification. So, I’m going to throw it over to you to explain to our listeners, I guess, your definition of what gamification really is.

Sure. So, little gamification has been around for a while, and it sort of had a rise to fame I don’t know, maybe 20 years ago. And what happened is that people just jumped on that, and I think I’ve tried to apply it really quickly because it was a way, you know, seen as a way to get more out of people. And I think as time went on and people got burnt by it and felt a little bit like that condescend maybe that gamification was a bit condescending by asking you to do little tasks and get rewards for it, I think people see through it. And I think as that whole gamification piece has matured, it’s now seen much more around sort of Behavioral psychology.

So look, there’s a couple of definitions of what gamification is. Jesse Schnell, he does a pretty good one that I like. He says, “A game is a problem-solving activity approach with a playful attitude.” And so when you kind of apply that to gamification, it’s solving solving activities with a playful attitude. Gamification kind of lends to that and is the application of game mechanics, so what we see in video games and the likes applied to real-world scenarios such as work with the goal to achieve something, right?

So, in the context of a contact centre, I guess the majority of our listeners are probably based in, you know, as you said, it’s been around for a little while, and I think initially, it was used as a “hey, do this, we’ll give you this” kind of thing, and not a lot of thought was put into it. But it’s obviously moved a lot in sophistication now. You’ve implemented a number of gamification projects, I guess, over the time, so we’ll cover implementation at another time. But I guess, in terms of the definition, like, why are we seeing contact centres use gamification now, and we’re recording this in 2023, or what is the benefit? Is there a clear benefit?

Look, I think contact centres have been doing gamification in some way, shape, or form for as long as I can remember ever since I’ve been in the industry. Basic terms were like movie tickets, right? I mean, do get a cheap this, and we’ll give you movie tickets. I mean, that’s a really basic form of gamification, right? Exactly. I mean, we see it with kids, right? You see they’ll get star charts and all that sort of stuff, and then we’re kind of slowest to the contact centre. We see things like leaderboards and points and badges and those sort of things. It’s flowed into, I think, contact centres because it’s highly measurable. It’s really easy to apply some of those basic game mechanics, points, badges and leaderboards.

I think from why we’re seeing a big emergence of it in contact centres in the last sort of five to ten years is because we’re starting to see platforms move into that space. So SAS platforms that enable it to be a lot easier because, in my time, when I was running a contact centre prior to any of these platforms coming in, we were doing things like cutting out badges and sticking them to walls and moving around and riding them on whiteboards, and it’s a lot of maintenance to be able to actually do those. I think now that these platforms are emerging and getting tacked onto bigger things, you know, so you see a lot of contacts in software going and buying a gamification platform and embedding it in their suite. So I think we’re seeing that become a bit more the norm. Yeah, you understand.

If someone was considering gamification, Luke, and now that you’ve been around the traps for a while, what would your recommendation be? Is it something that you think is absolutely worth it, you know, there are defined KPIs that you’re going to see improve, or is it, you know, test and learn, or be careful, or don’t even waste your time? Where are you in this game of it?

Look, I think it’s definitely worth doing, it’s just worth understanding before you implement. And I’ll give you a quick example. Yeah, we all are motivated differently, and this is why I actually like gamification, it’s kind of is the premise for why I got into it. We’re all motivated by something different. Typically, when we build key performance indicators or KPIs, we tend to focus on a particular demographic. It’s, we want you to hit this goal, and there’s a certain group within, say, a contact centre that’s really going to lean towards, you know, goal-driven achievements. There is also, but you think about contact centres, there’s a diverse place. Yeah, it’s so much an amazing diversity within them of all ages, races, the whole lot, right?

And, you know, someone who moves into, say, a contact centre space at the end of their career because they want to do good work, they want to feel like they’ve got a worthy job, but don’t really want to climb the corporate ladder. Those sort of hit these KPIs to get a reward or to move their career on, isn’t all that motivating. What they might like doing is sharing their life experience and sharing what they know and providing great service. So they’re motivated differently. And when we think about how people are motivated, we need to think about how we then reward and recognize them, and gamification actually provides some really good different ways of recognizing people, you know, giving people a sense of purpose, a sense of achievement, a sense of ownership, a sense of progress, all of these things are able and are enabled through the vehicle of gamification.

But I think the first lens before going, yep, we definitely need to do it, it’s really understanding your environment and looking across that contact centre and saying, let me have a look at the people who are going to be motivated by points and badges and leaderboards, let’s have a look at those people who are more motivated by the social aspects of work, let’s see who those people are motivated by problem-solving and working through complex ideas, and let’s have a look at those people who are really motivated by helping other people and developing the people around them. And when you start to work that out, you start to realize that the KPIs that maybe you’ve built initially don’t cater for all of them, and gamification could be a good solution.

Fantastic well there you go that gives us a very broad overview of what gamification is we’ve got a number of podcasts that we’ve recorded with Luke that you can listen to that actually dive deeper into a lot of those topics that we’ve touched on so make sure you just look at the CX Matters playlist and you’ll see all the titles there for which ones are going to be applicable for your situation Luke thank you very much for your time as per usual thanks Justin it’s been a pleasure being here and I really appreciate you having you on the podcast at any time all right thanks everyone for listening and we’ll catch you on the next podcast of the CX Matters bye for now