Gamification offers both employees and customers the positive and engaging experience. With daily tasks and services, companies succeed in increasing the loyalty, loyalty and commitment of customers and employees. Gamification is becoming increasingly popular with software providers for one reason – it works.
#Gamification is a kind of catchphrase today
The past decade has seen a rapid boom in the use of game concepts in various markets, as companies and organizations implement them with open arms. It’s reasonable: gamification is an ultimate tool to increase engagement and efficiency for any business. What’s more, gamification is an essential element of any company’s digital transformation, so we decided to explore its capabilities on a deeper level.
What is #Gamification? Gamification is the process of integrating playful techniques into non-gaming environments to involve people, solve problems, and analyze user behavior patterns. The use can benefit a variety of industries. While some people believe the game market is limited to e-commerce, education, advertising / marketing, and entertainment, the benefits of the game will be felt in the manufacturing, retail, utilities, health, and electronics industries, as well as financial and global advisory services expanded.
INCREASE IN COMMITMENT AND PRODUCTIVITY
In the business context, gamification enables game mechanisms to be implemented in any business application. It can increase employee productivity or customer interest in the products of different companies. A game system encourages, motivates and helps make better decisions by influencing people’s natural desires for competition and performance.
The game form originating from video games is used in various areas, but is most often used in the consumer or employee world. According to Gallup’s 2016 The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis Report, only 13 percent of employees are engaged in their actual jobs. The introduction of game concepts into the business practice of companies such as #Nike, #eBay, #Starbucks, #IBM, #NBC has led to a significant improvement in the situation. Challenge Timer is the productivity app that uses the Pomodoro method to increase engagement and productivity.
It marks tasks as achievements and gives employees a positive feeling for their work. Challenge Timer has a limited break for the tasks and thus creates a regular time schedule. To stop the task, an employee has to admit defeat. And it is clear that nobody likes to be lost or defeated. However, healthcare is one of the best examples of effective game implementation.
GAMIFICATION IN HEALTHCARE
The proliferation of mobile devices and wearables that has been observed in recent decades has opened up more opportunities for the gaming market. A suitable example is the health and wellness market. With this industry becoming increasingly expensive, insurance companies, employers and healthcare providers are struggling to keep people away from hospitals by managing their health through performance-based activities.
The gamification of the wellness area offers a variety of advantages for health companies, e.g. increasing employee engagement, reducing costs, improving results, motivating patients, adhering to health plans, and changing user behavior in a simple manner. A good example is the Apple group, which has long wanted to participate in health care with devices such as Apple Watches and iPhones because the owners are encouraged to perform various care or fitness tasks to receive a reward.
#Fitocracy is another great example of an app that gives users the feeling of progress through experience and leveling up. Quests and achievements help users find each other and create online fitness groups. In this way Fitocracy encourages other users to work out a healthy diet and eat healthy.
HOW DOES SAP GAMIFICATION USE?
The software giant #SAP AG has been using gamification since 2006 and introduced its own cloud-based gamification platform in 2015. The arrival of this major player in the corporate and software industry marked a new phase in the gaming industry as it enabled the transition from a niche to a mainstream technology.
SAP Cloud Platform Gamification enables the introduction of game concepts in large corporate systems. The platform offers an administration environment for the management and development of game mechanics, a web API for easy integration of applications, a range of widgets, real-time feedback, game analysis for the continuous improvement of game concepts and single sign-on (SSO) support the SAP ID service.
Advantages of the SAP Cloud Platform
Based on our experience in SAP implementation and game design, we at staff-eye decided to test the SAP Cloud Platform Gamification to demonstrate some benefits that can play a key role for users, as well as those aspects of the platform that still need to be developed.
- First of all, the SAP Cloud Platform Gamification offers functions such as points (measurement in an application, where points can be viewed as a reward for completed actions), levels (indication of competence in the gaming experience), badges (a form of reaching the user) and Missions (goals of player activity).
- The system offers a division between different teams and makes the data analysis process more comfortable by defining the efficiency of the entire group of people, so that it is not necessary to take into account the results of individual group members and to manually determine the average value.
- However, the greatest strength of this system is real-time analytics. The SAP platform does not require its users to regularly monitor player performance and behavior patterns, as it provides a comprehensive analysis that makes the process more efficient and convenient. SAP Analytics provides the insight and relevant data that the user needs to analyze the activities of the players.
- The notification system. SAP Cloud Platform Gamification informs players about events, the points they have collected or success in the application. It helps to involve the players in the game experience and to give them a positive reinforcement. In addition, this platform offers the developer the possibility to create a sequence of actions, a so-called quest series, in a simple and intuitive way.
- It is also important to note a high level of data security of the system, which is guaranteed as part of the SAP Cloud Platform Gamification. The user data is stored in secure SAP data centers around the world, where it is protected in a variety of ways.
There are also some problems, but we are working to solve them. Although the developers cannot specify that the application design should be changed and adapted to their own content, the system only allows changes to the symbols of badges, user images and missions.
The SAP solution uses points as the basis for developing processes and configures everything around them that can be confusing for developers. For example, in the event of a design error, the developer may be forced to go a long way to find and fix the error. A good alternative would be to identify all the units on the platform and create a game system based on them. Such a solution can make the application creation process easier.
Currently, the SAP game solution does not offer the mechanics of daily, weekly or monthly tasks, as well as missions available at certain times, and it does not offer a mobile version that is yet to come.
WHY DO ALL THIS DO WITH GAMIFIED BUSINESS SOLUTIONS?
The popularity of game technologies and their business adaptation continues to grow. The entry of such a global giant as SAP into the gaming market marks the beginning of a new phase in the gaming industry, namely the switch from a new and exotic to a mainstream technology. With its 300,000 customers worldwide who successfully use their applications and innovations, the SAP Cloud Platform Gamification has proven its efficiency and reliability and helps to easily integrate game concepts into new and existing applications.
Gamification offers both employees and customers a positive and engaging experience. Through daily tasks and services, companies succeed in increasing the loyalty and virality of customers and employees. Game bonuses help promote new products and services and also serve as a reminder of older goods. Long story short, the way of playing is only so popular because it works.
