Badgeville’s 5.0 platform is aimed at gamifying the world’s largest companies

Badgeville is slowly but surely perfecting its platform for making work more fun. It probably has a long way to go on that from the perspective of most employees, but it is systematically improving its “gamification” platform. Today, Badgeville is launching its Behavior Platform 5.0, which targets the world’s largest companies and offers rewards aimed at enhancing customer and employee engagement.

The idea is to use game-like mechanics to encourage people to do activities that aren’t normally fun or they wouldn’t normally do. 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.

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“With enhancements focused on depth, breadth, and scalability, The Behavior Platform 5.0 leaves behind first-generation gamification solutions focused solely on points, badges, and leaderboards,” said Ted Farrell, the chief technology officer at Redwood City, Calif.-based Badgeville. “With this release, we’ve delivered next-generation features that will transform what enterprises and [business-to-consumer] companies expect from a gamification platform, helping them build more personalized, rewarding user experiences that drive long-term engagement.”

Market research firm Gartner predicts that 70 percent of the Fortune 2000 companies will have at least one gamified app by the end of 2014.

With Behavior Platform 5.0, Badgeville makes it easy for a corporation to adopt gamification practices and tailor them to its own needs. The new features include social rewards, which recognize a user for his interactions with a brand on social networks. You can give a reward to someone who tweets about your product. That drives better retention of users and advocacy.

Badgeville has also included more personalization so that employers can build custom rewards for users based on location, gender, job title, interest, and more.

For corporations, the platform has enterprise-grade security, management tools to manage multiple programs from one unified interface, and platform-event subscriptions. The latter means that the system will send out a notification when a user earns a reward on Badgeville-powered site.

The platform is already used by American Express, Kimpton Hotels, Samsung, Oracle, Bell Media, Kendall Jackson, CA, Philips Electronics, and others.

“The Behavior Platform provides us with a scalable, sophisticated, and enterprise-grade gamification solution to meet the needs of our world-class loyalty programs,” said Nicki Powers, the engagement strategist at Maritz Motivation Solutions. “The new features of 5.0 will further help us deliver comprehensive, wall-to-wall engagement programs for our customers.”

Right now, only 28 percent of today’s consumers ever log in to a web-based community, and more than half are inactive in loyalty programs. The average adoption rate of enterprise apps is around 50 percent, and 70 percent of employees are not engaged with their jobs. Only 19 percent of customers say that loyalty programs affect their buying discussions. That data comes from sources including Colloquy, Gartner, Gallup-Healthways, and Neochange.

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Gallup estimates $550 billion in lost productivity from poor employee engagement.