Person 2 Person Engagement
Google under-defines Gamification as: “the application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service”.
More specifically, gamification is the method of applying a digital overlay across interactions within a company to create a rich and engaging behavior change experience for each user.
Effective gamification is the rocket fuel of organizational performance and accelerated customer loyalty.
When done properly, gamification also helps build and sustain a salient emotional bond between an organization and its employees and between an organization and its customers.
Effective gamification is a powerful organization development strategy that can effect real transformational change across a vast organizational landscape. It can also be used to build and lead high performance teams and to performance-coach individual employees.
While gamification is a rather broad term, it applies a number of methods of interweaving data driven elements into a company’s systems, processes and culture. It does this in part by helping to reshape and build new human behaviors and interactions in a way that fosters high performance, collaborative learning, problem solving and, most of all, discretionary effort towards the realization of business goals.
Through the careful integration of motivational science, big data, computers, smart phones, the internet, and other wearable technologies, gamification can become, interchangeably, a totally immersive and feature-rich learning experience and one of the easiest to use real world performance management and leadership strategies currently available to managers and team leaders.
Bunchball: Your Leader in High Performance Gamification
You’ve probably heard that 80% of current gamification initiatives are failing or destined to fail due to poor design and implementation (much like the 90% of all organizational change initiatives that fail due to so called human factors). That means 20% of gamification initiatives are succeeding.
This blog post is not about gamification failure and underperformance. It’s not about video games or Dungeons and Dragons in the work place. This blog post is about High Performance Gamification.
It’s about the world’s leading example, - the cream of the crop of gamification interventions that consistently get extraordinary business results.
More specifically, this post is about a gamification company who repeatedly creates previously unimagined business results and in some instances even complete and rapid organizational transformation across a divergent array of business types and sizes.
This blog post is about Bunchball.
This blog post is about Bunchball.
Bunchball specializes in gamification solutions for companies that are looking to radically increase their business and team performance in a way that builds sustained active employee and customer engagement.
Bunchball has mastered the art and science of systematically identifying and precision delivering the concentrated stuff of human motivation to those specific tasks, organizational learning processes and role behaviors that positively impact each company’s organizational culture and bottom line business outcomes.
Employees, teams and business units receive clearly stated performance goals. They’re positively reinforced for behaviors (including learning) that lead to the quickest realization of those goals.
Performance and corrective feedback are provided in real time based both on individual performance and big data streams that link multiple actors and stakeholders inside and outside of the organization.
The end goal is to motivate people and rapidly build upon or change existing behaviors and then to generalize and maintain those new skills, through a deeply engaging and motivating interaction, a learning experience that creates real, immediate value and benefit for the end user.
Bunchball is generating one powerful business success story after another. From its work with corporate giants like Coca Cola and Ford to major television networks, technology and marketing companies; all of whom are utilizing elite gamification interventions to revolutionize how they do business.
1. This is How Rajat Paharja Is Redefining Gamification:
What’s the #1 reason Bunchball are hands down the world’s top high performance gamification company? Well, it’s because they are literally defining the very conceptual and strategic essence of their craft as it evolves.
Rajat Paharia, arguably one of the most influential and inspiring gamification thought leaders (also founder and Chief Product Officer @Bunchball) has recently been helping to clarify and defend the true definition of high performance gamification:
“…gamification isn’t about using “games.” Gamification is about motivating people through data – capturing the big data that your customers, partners and employees generate as they interact with online experiences, and then using that data to motivate better performance.” (Bunchball Blog)
“Gamification enables businesses to motivate customers, employees and partners to engage in high- value interactions - the very interactions that drive more sales, stronger collaboration, better ROI, deeper loyalty and higher customer satisfaction.” - (Huffington Post)
If you’re considering gamification for your own organization, it may be a read worth millions to you.
Apart from providing the industry its most valuable thought leadership there are several other reasons Bunchball is the World’s Leading #Gamification Company.
Second to the top of that list is their continuous stream of industry leading success stories, case studies and accolades. Take a look for yourself:
2. Bunchball Helped Coca Cola Strike Pure Brand Loyalty Gold!
• With Bunchball, Coca Cola launched My Coke Rewards targeting millennials primarily.
• Within a short time of launching the program the company was able to boast a lifetime membership of over 20 million members!
3. Bunchball and Gamification are Changing How we Consume Our Media
● The largest television networks in the world are allying themselves with Bunchball and utilizing their gamification model and ready to use tools to further engage their customers.
● USA, Bravo, and NBC have already started on the path of altering the way TV fans connecti and interact with the companies.
● These companies have or are implementing social features into the television shows allowing each viewer to truly integrate into the community
• The viewer audience online jumped from a lackluster 9 million views a month to a breathtaking 16 million views.
• Average time on the show’s website went from 14 minutes to 22 minutes!
• Overall, by utilizing gamification they drove up active viewer engagement and arguably saved the network!
• Bunchball and USA created a user-driven social overlay called Club Psych a literal performance benchmark for the industry.
“In developing the program, we wanted to provide something to our fans for their unwavering loyalty to USA’s originals. Through CLUB PSYCH – the first initiative of its kind – we’ve seen our fans go from enthusiastic to rabid online evangelists or self-described ‘PSYCHOS’, spreading the word for Psych offerings and encouraging others to participate. You can’t ask for a stronger metric for success than this type of overwhelming fan engagement.”
4. Gamification Effectiveness is Synonymous with Customer Experience
• Bunchball doesn’t have to come up with false claims or brag because their customers, real experts in the field and armchair gamification Jedi’s from around the world do the bragging for them:
• in 2011 Buchball’s customer base doubled and has since gone up by 150%
• By providing an unparalleled customer service experience, Bunchball is being hired more than ever in recent years to help some of the world’s top companies share in the extraordinary business results.
5. Nitro - The Engine of High Performance Gamification
• One of the most inspiring stories behind Bunchball’s success has been with its incredible Nitro Platform, especially through its most recent addition Nitro 5.0
• Nitro now receives over 70 million unique monthly users and over 2 billion interactions per month.
• If volume talks, then how much talking does 2 billion interactions get?
• Check out the video:
6. Crafting a Transformative High Performance Culture @Bluewolf
• There is more to customer interaction and engagement than boosting the audience. A vibrant culture must be created to keep the visitors returning, happy, and excited for the project.
• Bunchball utilized their gamification strategies and exploded the marketing company Bluewolf’s brand reach, employee engagement and audience connection by partnering in their social media and other processes and using them to drive deep-engagement and user loyalty. The result? A complete cultural transformation!
Natasha Oxenburgh, the Social Programs Manager at Bluewolf describes the Bunchball experience beautifully:
"We’ve seen a total cultural transformation after deploying gamification from Bunchball to motivate our employees to participate in our Going Social program. We've tripled traffic to our website from social media platforms, tripled our blog readership, and have seen an eightfold increase in our blogger community. Internally, we saw collaboration increase 57 percent. Best of all, we’ve sustained those high levels of engagement ever since.” - Natasha Oxenburgh (Bunchball Website)
7. Bunchball and Ford: Active Employee Engagement from the Inside Out
Ford ran an audit on their customer service results and discovered that it was drastically low. Fearing that bad customer service could lead to a loss of sales and ultimately end up in a lack of profit, the company knew it had to make a big change and fast.
Instead of the company spending loads of money investing in retraining their sales associates or in other marketing focused initiatives, they did something far more interesting. They partnered with Bunchball.
Bunchball and Ford designed an interactive portal for employees that came complete with a game where employees can earn Loyalty Badges and other great positive reinforcers in exchange for virtual learning and engagement interaction with their product.
"From day one, the site experienced a burst of activity with over 100,000 unique visits. By week five, actions per user more than doubled, and total actions increased another 60%. Engagement with the portal increased with all employees, and a positive correlation between engagement and key sales and satisfaction performance indicators was proven." - Bunchball Website
By simply integrating an interactive piece of gamification content, the moral and loyalty of Ford’s employees increased measurably also increasing customer service and driving sales.
8. Gamification Excellence in A Call Center Context? Oh Yes!
Live Ops is an industry leader in cloud based contact center outsourcing. They’ve built a vast 20K+ strong network of call center agents, independent contractors from across the country who take and make customer calls from the privacy an comfort of their own homes.
• One of the most important and costly processes in the call center staffing industry is training and employee development. Can you imagine how much more challenging this would be for an organization like Live Ops who need to provide high value training to tens of thousands of employees who are working from home?
• The Solution? The "My Work Community" portal, yet another powerful application of Bunchball's extraordinary Nitro platform.
• Thanks to Bunchball Live Ops can now train, super motivate and most importantly, grow and retain higher numbers of their customer contact employees.
• My Work Community creates virtual learning and development missions that train and generalize new skills, while measurably increasing customer satisfaction and reducing call times:
- “Agents could get badges and points if they completed additional training and certifications (this takes care of the autonomy, mastery, and progress motivators).
- They received reward points for increased call conversion, and all points were tracked on public leader boards. (ditto);
- Sharing knowledge, coaching, and networking were also rewarded with badges and real-time feedback (social interaction and contributing to a greater good).”
“Introduction of the platform was met with an 80% adoption rate in the very first week. And these adopters were found to have outperformed non-users by 23%, with an average +9% higher rate of customer satisfaction. Further measurement proved that gamification reduced training from an average of four weeks, to 14 hours. That's over three-and-a-half weeks of earned productivity.”
- Andre Bourque from Social Media Today
9. Is Gamification An Ultimate Active Employee Engagement Strategy?
The holy grail of contemporary business excellence is the pursuit of what’s called active employee engagement.
Gallup recently found that a 240 percent boost in performance in business outcomes is possible just by engaging your employees and customers.
Bunchball is leading that edge today with customer retention, time spent at each site, and this done primarily by measurably increasing active employee engagement on the job, in real time.
Bunchball is proving that they are the number one customer-driven company that is absolutely changing the way companies interact with their employees. As Rajat summarizes it so perfectly:
“Here’s the amazing thing about human motivation: If you can tap into it properly, there’s a never-ending supply of it. It’s like cold fusion for loyalty. And whoever figures out how to harness that energy is going to win.” - Quote form Fast Company Magazine
And harnessing the boundless energy source of human motivation is exactly what Bunchball is doing! This is what the industry itself is saying:
10. If The Industry Itself Were A Gamification Platform Buchball Would Be at the Top Of the Leader Board!
Bunchball is not only about providing just the right data driven rewards and recognition for just the right high performance behaviors within the companies that they serve.
They're also earning their own rewards and recognition for their extraordinary leadership role in the gamification industry as a whole.
Bunchball has become synonymous with excellence for creating deep engagement customer experiences by constantly striving to provide better, more targeted, and more effective marketing, active engagement and loyalty initiatives Bunchball is not only helping to turn companies around, they are now able to help create them from the ground up!
• In 2010 Bunchball won the prestigious Media Vanguard Award for Best Social-Media Loyalty Programs.The MVA was award based on Bunchball's landmark success with USA Network.
Bunchball is Nominated For Top Honors in 2014:
Engaging the consumer, and the representative, their efforts have made T-Mobile, once a second rate carrier, into one the top cellular companies in the industry. Through their use of gamification tools, they have been able to increase T-Mobile’s image and presence in the market.
UPDATE: They won this one! Congratulations Bunchball!
Rajat Paharia (@rajatrocks)
Founder at Bunchball, Inc. - the Leader in Gamification. Author of WSJ & NY Times Best Seller - Loyalty 3.0
3. Best Use of Engagement Techniques in Employee Engagement
Allied International Credit Corp. (AIC)
Doing something that very few if any other companies has been able to do Bunchball took an industry that suffers from low morale, high turnover and other industry-wide poor performance variables and effected a complete overhaul.
Working with Allied International Credit Corp. (AIC), they were able to help redesign the call center's core processes to make it a great place to work. Through engaging the employees, they created motivation that turned the performance, the satisfaction, and the overall organizational feel around.
4. Best Use of Engagement Techniques in Consumer Facing Applications
Bunchball was nominated for their tremendous work and success with the Coke Rewards Program that gathered over 20 million people into their program!
It's Time Invite Bunchball To Join Your Team!
Bunchball and its founder Rajat Paharia are absolutely changing everything we thought we knew about organizational performance, social media, customer engagement, marketing, branding and loyatly.
Through gamification, they have absolutely changed the way the top companies in the world are interacting with their employees and customers.
Believing in gamification when other speculated that it wouldn’t last, they have not just become a size-doubling corporation that does gamification; they are a corporation that has become synonymous with gamification and how it's continuously being redefined and improved.
Individualization and attention to detail are just a part of the reason why Bunchball has not only survived, but has excelled when many competitors can’t even get off the ground in the first place.
Taking giants like Coca-Cola and breathing new life into their marketing, they were able to reach a niche market that other marketers had underestimated through a technology they could not even see.
Can you imagine how your organization will benefit with the ready to implement tool, strategies and expert knowledge that Bunchall will bring to the table?
It’s time to let Bunchball join your team. It’s faster, easier and more affordable than you think!
