Badgeville launches new data analytics to gamify work and improve consumer loyalty

Badgeville, the company that gamifies work and customer engagement, has launched a new data analytics service dubbed MotivationMetrics. Its purpose is to make it easier for companies to gather a huge amount of social data and figure out how to motivate customers and employees to meet certain targets.

The new service helps companies gamify processes, such as sales, or whether a customer returns to a website, and measures performance, recognizing those who deliver the best performance across an organization. Badgeville calls this digital motivation, but others have called it gamification, or using game mechanics for non-game purposes. In this way, the company uses its customers to motivate employees to do their best, thereby improving consumer retention.

“What we are doing with MotivationMetrics is helping businesses to engage better with their customers and employees,” said Karen Hsu, vice president at Redwood City, Calif.-based Badgeville, in an interview with VentureBeat.

The company is using a Hadoop big data architecture that allows it to scale out its platform. The platform has 40 prebuilt reports that companies using its service can see in a dashboard. These are designed to help companies get their own customers to adopt new behaviors, such as visiting a website, or to get employees to hit sales or other goals.

“The first step is adoption, and the next step is to get people to perform at the levels we want them to,” Hsu said. “And finally, what we want to deliver is recognition. That helps managers find out who and where the best talent is. And it recognizes the star performers and motivates them intrinsically.”

MotivationMetrics is designed to keep track of customers and sort them into these different groups. That allows companies to tweak how they motivate the target groups to do something. Hsu said that intrinsic motivation lasts longer than extrinsic motivations, such as monetary rewards.

Above: Badgeville’s MotivationMetrics dashboard.

Image Credit: Badgeville

Badgeville has tried out the new platform with existing customers such as Booz Allen Hamilton, the global consulting firm, and Melbourne Storm, the pro rugby team in Australia.

The consulting firm saw a 40 percent improvement in its engagement on one particular goal, thanks to Badgeville, Hsu said. The firm wanted to grow its expertise in data science among its consultants. So, using Badgeville, it designed a program to motivate employees to go through a data science training program.

“They tapped into some natural competitive instincts, and focused the leaderboards on teams,” Hsu said.

Melbourne Storm is a Badgeville customer that wanted to get fans to buy merchandise and come back even during the off-season. Badgeville rewards its customers for coming back to the website.

“From January to April, there’s not a lot of activity,” Hsu said. “We want to improve the engagement, and we learn what behaviors matter to us.”

The longer people were on the website, the more likely they were to make a purchase, Hsu said of the rugby team’s fans. After using Badgeville, the rugby team saw an 80 percent increase in spending on the game day, a 71 percent increase in video views, a 52 percent increase in dwell time, a 30 percent better return rate, and 9 percent increase in retention of customers. That added up to a lot of money.

“There is a wide range of analytics tools that help slice and dice data, but much of it lives within the conventional silos of BI, CRM and other monolithic platforms — there’s no way to see what influences engagement across the systems, nor do these tools tell you how to drive improvement,” said Steve Sims, chief design officer at Badgeville, in a statement. “That’s where MotivationMetrics is different. It not only lets you see what rewards users are achieving on the Badgeville platform, it also visualizes behaviors and who’s performing what to give you definitive recommendations and strategies to help you achieve business outcomes.”

Badgeville was founded in 2010 and has 50 employees. Customers include American Express, Samsung, Walmart, and Kendall Jackson. Hsu said the company had more than 300 deployments.

“We find companies can use us across many different use cases, internally with employees or externally with customers,” Hsu said.

Above: Badgeville MotivationMetrics dashboard.

Image Credit: Badgeville