The Overall Impact of Gamification on Social CRM

By Barton Goldenberg

Gamification is all about organizations applying social technology to time-tested, motivational methods.   Millennials love to play games – they grew up playing them.  Gamification within a business setting can help motivate Millennial employees and customers to perform certain activities within their Social CRM system.

Here is a primary list of exemplary ways that Gamification impacts Social CRM.  Gamification can be used within the Social CRM system to:

• Motivate sales reps, e.g., each time a sales rep uploads a new lead from a Social Media community, the reps receives 10 points and moves up in the leaderboard rankings. If the rep closes a $50,000 deal, he/she gets 1,000 points and receives the coveted ‘Super Salesperson’ badge.
• Encourage employees to review the latest information about the customer located with a customer profile to ensure that they are ‘in-the-know’ when dealing with that customer.
• Encourage employees to continue to improve the organization’s Social Media monitoring and filtering to ensure a steady stream of social insight information coming into the organization and into individual customer profiles.
• Encourage customers and partners to participate in the organization’s internal and external Social Media communities so that they can earn points and other rewards as they participate.
• Better service customers because the Contact Center agent is a happy agent, in part resulting from being able to benefit from the Gamification features within the Social CRM system.
• Improve marketing campaigns by providing marketers with points, badges and other relevant rewards for tracking marketing campaigns and taking pro-active steps to improve these campaigns.

In other words, all Social CRM functions can be gamified to help drive enhanced utilization of that function.  This is why both Social Media platform vendors as well as Social CRM software vendors are adding more and more Gamification functionality to their software.  These vendors aim to help organizations motivate their Social CRM system users to better leverage the Social CRM application in their day-to-day sales, marketing and customer service activities. I am a big believer in Gamification and feel strongly that now is the time for organizations to jump onto the Gamification bandwagon and begin to leverage its value-add in their Social CRM efforts.

In my next blog post, I will discuss the business value of Big Data analytics/insight.

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Barton Goldenberg, is the founder and president of ISM Inc., customer-centric strategists/implementers serving best-in-class organizations globally. As a CRM leader for 30 years, he was among the first three inductees in the CRM Hall of Fame. Recognized as a leading “customer-focused” author, his latest book, The Definitive Guide to Social CRM, is hailed as the roadmap for Social CRM success. Barton is a popular speaker on “maximizing customer relationships to gain market insights, customers and profits”. He is a long-term columnist for CRM Magazine and speaker for CRMevolution and frequently quoted in the media.