Badgeville releases analytics engine to improve enterprise gamification

Badgeville has raised more than $40 million to pioneer “gamification,” or the use of game-like mechanics such as leaderboards to motivate people to engage in non-game work more enthusiastically. And today, the company is releasing its new analytics platform for enterprises that want to better understand the effectiveness of their gamification work.

Redwood City, California-based Badgeville is slowly but surely perfecting its platform for making work more fun. It can increase loyalty to a website by rewarding the consumer for coming back. And applied to the enterprise, gamification can get salespeople to compete with each other to get the top prize for the most sales. With its platform, Badgeville is trying to be about a lot more than badges. It works well with social communities, sales performance, customer support, and training, said Steve Sims, chief designer officer and cofounder of the behavior labs at Badgeville, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We wanted much more flexibility as the market matures,” Sims said. “The kinds of things people are looking for have changed. Now they can tailor it to different use cases. Analytics have been around for a long time, but we understand better what people need now. This means that business intelligence is really coming to gamification tools.”

The analytics give customers real-time feedback on employee behavior, much the same way that social game companies like Zynga learn what their players are doing in mobile and social games. The analytics allow customers to track, analyze, and report. They can see what is happening with how often users return to a gamification application, such as a sales incentive game. In a content creation application, a company could now study if people are creating the desired content, or why they are not.

Badgeville can also use anonymized data to show customers how their results compare to industry benchmarks.

A few years ago, during the height of enthusiasm for gamification, market research firm Gartner predicts that 70 percent of the Fortune 2000 companies would have at least one gamified app by the end of 2014. Since then, gamification has seen its setbacks. And yet the adoption continues, Sims said.

Gallup estimates $550 billion in lost productivity from poor employee engagement. Badgeville was founded in 2010. The company’s original chief executive, Kris Duggan, has moved on. But Jon Shalowitz leads the company now.

“Analytics are increasingly important to our customers as they expand their gamification across the enterprise,” Shalowitz said in a statement. “Badgeville Analytics provides unique insight into employee engagement with enterprise applications. Now customers can see detailed user and usage patterns across all their gamified applications.”

The analytics are available to all Badgeville customers. Customers include Walmart, American Express, Samsung, Medtronic, Kendall Jackson, and USAA.

“Gamification creates a feedback loop, and the analytics help you tune it for long-term success,” Sims said.

Above: Badgeville lets users sort through custom analytics reports.

Image Credit: Badgeville