Top 25 Best Examples of Gamification in Business Posted on March 24, 2014 by Robert Stanley

http://blogs.clicksoftware.com/clickipedia/top-25-best-examples-of-gamification-in-business/

Gamification is used by brands to motivate employees, create healthy competition among teams, generate buzz or

social proof, and encourage customer loyalty, among other benefits. With a variety of techniques – some easy to

implement, some requiring advanced planning, coding, or technical expertise – any business can use gamification to

get better results, no matter what your goals.

Gamification is used by brands to motivate employees, create healthy competition among teams, generate buzz or

social proof, and encourage customer loyalty, among other benefits. With a variety of techniques – some easy to

implement, some requiring advanced planning, coding, or technical expertise – any business can use gamification to

get better results, no matter what your goals.

These 25 examples of gamification in business run the gamut for potential uses, but brands are coming up with

innovative ways to incorporate game-like features into ordinary activities every day. Listed in no particular order of

importance, these 25 stellar uses of gamification are sure to spark some creativity and get your competitive gears

turning for ways to put the fun back in business.

1. U.S. Army – America’s Army

Gamification Use: Recruitment

The U.S. Army is no stranger to using games for training purposes, but now it’s using gamification to attract new

recruits and generally promote awareness of the U.S. armed forces. America’s Army has attracted millions of potential

new recruits. This effort was initiated back in 1999, and the first version was released in 2002. By 2008, four

transportable “Virtual Army Experience” units were hitting shopping malls and public events. More than a decade in

the making, the U.S. Army has turned its knowledge and experience of training games into a powerful recruiting tool.

2. Jillian Michaels

Gamification Use: Motivation and Goal Tracking

Jillian Michaels encourages users to stay on track with her fitness programs using gamification techniques for a

number of fitness challenges. With a multitude of challenges to choose from, users can select a program that’s most

closely aligned with personal goals and lifestyle. Each challenge uses its own set of gamification techniques, such as

contests and prizes, badges, partner and group challenges.

3. Samsung Nation

Gamification Use: Social Loyalty and Customer Engagement

Samsung gets social and creates user-generated content by rewarding users for getting engaged with the community,

participating in Q&A discussions with other users, watching videos, reviewing products, and other activities. In

exchange for their participation, users are awarded with badges and progress through levels of achievement.

Samsung already had hundreds of thousands of visitors, so it didn’t need to put much effort into driving visitors to the

site. Instead, it focused on explaining the benefits of getting involved with the community to encourage users to review

products and create valuable branded content for the company.

4. Treehouse

Gamification Use: Goal Tracking and Proof of Achievement

Treehouse is a virtual training academy for learning code, app development, and business skills, used by beginners to

learn valuable career skills and experienced professionals for career advancement. Students choose from various

tracks for defined outcomes, and earn badges and points as they work through the library of courses to show off their

achievements and impress potential employers. Tracks are broken into manageable chunks, and a tracker shows your

progress as you work towards your goals. The more points you earn, the higher your potential salary.

5. Mint.com

Gamification Use: Fostering Financial Independence and Goal Tracking

Mint.com makes the ordinarily painful process of demystifying your financials and planning for your future simpler and

more entertaining through gamification. By employing a variety of goal trackers, visual breakdowns for better

understanding of your spending habits and budget allocation, and easy-to-interpret charts and graphs outlining your

personal financial plan, Mint.com is helping everyday people plan secure financial futures and get back on track with

their financial goals. Would you rather analyze a spreadsheet or use a cool app that creates a colorful display to show

you exactly where your money’s going every month – automatically?

6. Recyclebank

Gamification Use: Customer Loyalty and Rewards

Recyclebank rewards users for doing everyday things that are good for the environment, such as learning how to cut

back on water consumption or purchasing greener products – specifically, those with the Recyclebank logo. Users

earn points by working their way through a tiered series of questions and answers, learning about greener living

practices and pledging to follow them, and exchanging points for rewards. Rewards include pretty sweet discounts (20

percent off, $10 or $20 off, etc.) from vendors such as 1800FLOWERS.com, The Honest Company, Macy’s, and

more, and you can compare your rank against other users to gauge your green-living status.

7. Pierce County Library – Teen Summer Challenge

Gamification Use: Promoting Literacy and Building Membership

The Pierce County Library makes use of gamification to encourage teens to read throughout the summer. With a

series of challenges designed to take teens on “an epic journey,” young readers can select categories and badges

that look interesting to them. Anyone can register and participate, but prizes are only issued to teens with a valid

Pierce County Library card. With leaderboards to track your progress against others, a points system, and a

dashboard that displays user statistics, this program turns reading into a fun summer activity while boosting

membership for the library.

8. Kaplan University

Gamification Use: Educational Achievement

Kaplan University implemented Badgeville solutions to enhance its curriculum by encouraging more engaged

participation. By incorporating challenges and badges, Kaplan saw results such as higher student grades, decreased

rates of students failing to complete courses and programs, and conducted behavior analysis to differentiate what

distinguishes the most successful students from the rest in order to derive gamification processes that would foster the

same practices across the student population, according to InformationWeek.

9. Teleflora Rewards

Gamification Use: Social Loyalty and Customer Engagement

Teleflora’s Rewards program gives customers one point for every dollar spent on the website. For every 150 points

accumulated, users get a $15 discount on a future purchase. Users also get perks like sneak previews of upcoming

products, the opportunity to pre-order new products before they’re available to the public, free email gift reminders,

bonus points for special offers, and more. Points are also awarded for social loyalty activities, such as posting reviews,

leaving Facebook comments, and answering other customers’ questions, with points and rewards activity is tracked in

a leaderboard.

10. Step2

Gamification Use: Customer Loyalty

Step2 makes a variety of children’s products, encouraging parents to get involved with creating buzz about the brand

using a loyalty program. Customers get involved by writing reviews and engaging with other customers to create buzz

surrounding Step2 products, earning points for their activities and gradually working their way up several levels,

designated by badges, to become influencers. The leaderboard ranks users by level and influence, displaying a

number of stats such as the number of reviews written, number of helpful votes, shares, photos and videos, and more.

11. Keas

Gamification Use: Employee Wellness, Cost Reduction

Keas is an employee wellness platform used by enterprises to maintain lower group health insurance costs and

reduce expenses such as unnecessary sick days. Keas employs gamification within its platform, enabling employees

from client companies to log in to a personal dashboard to view stats, earn awards for achievements for completing

tasks, and even support co-workers for progress towards their goals.

12. The World Bank – Evoke

Gamification Use: Solving World Problems

Evoke is an educational game encouraging youth to develop innovative solutions to the world’s biggest challenges,

such as hunger and poverty. The World Bank, which created Evoke, describes the game as “a crash course in

changing the world.” Players are challenges to complete ten missions and ten quests paced over the course of ten

weeks. Those who successfully complete the required challenges earn the distinction of “World Bank Institute Social

Innovator.” But that’s not all: Winners from the original graduating class in 2010 reaped benefits such as seed funding

for new ventures, travel scholarships to share their visions at the EVOKE Conference in Washington, D.C., and online

mentorships with business leaders and social leaders from around the world.

13. DevHub

Gamification Use: Project Completion

DevHub didn’t quite expect such a massive impact from implementing a few simple game-like features into its

platform, such as awarding badges (called devatars) for completing certain tasks. Forbes reports that the company

was rather astonished when it watched the percentage of users who actually completed projects jump from just 10

percent to 80 percent. Basically, the strategy aims to incentivize users to work their way through the more tedious or

challenging tasks that tend to make people throw in the towel or procrastinate.

14. Verizon Insider

Gamification Use: Customer Loyalty and Engagement

Verizon Wireless ramped up customer engagement with some gamification tricks in Verizon Insider, a community hub

where users can get exclusive offers, participate in online and real-world events, and engage with the community

through writing reviews and other interactions to earn points. By getting personal and more interactive, and rewarding

users for getting involved, Verizon is amplifying brand recognition and driving loyalty.

15. 4food

Gamification Use: Social Loyalty, Brand Awareness, Engagement, and Social Missions

A visit to the 4food website is like a big game. Whether you’re checking out the badge-like core company values,

“flipping the bird” for a discount offer, or building your own burger, a 4food website visit is one customers won’t soon

forget. The 4foods goal is to de-junk fast food, but they also donate 25 cents to a good cause every time a

(W)holeburger is purchased. Check out what’s trending, learn about the ingredients of the many 4foods burgers, or go

to the BuildBoard to “Build your burger, then make it good4all by giving it a name, and telling us: what is your

purpose?”

16. Proof

Gamification Use: Motivation, Goal Tracking

Proof is a Mindbloom app (which has a number of other gamification apps, as well) that’s a great example of

gamification in its own right. But it can also be used by a small business or enterprise to encourage healthy

competition and achieve goals, thanks to the ability to use it alone or with a group of other users. With Proof, users

create 7-day challenges and capture photo or video proof using smartphones to track progress and prove that they

actually met the challenge. Brands that put this app to use can incorporate rewards to those who complete challenges,

turning it into a motivational tool for the workforce. Small business owner or consultant? You can find a way to use this

app with clients, too.

17. Engine Yard

Gamification Use: Customer Engagement

Engine Yard is a platform for deploying, scaling, and monitoring applications. The company implemented a Zendesk

knowledge base, but didn’t see the levels of engagement they had hoped for. To encourage participation, Engine Yard

incorporated badges and other gamification tactics to boost participation and reward users for making contributions to

the community. By doing so, it successfully increased user-generated content for its customer self-help portal,

decreasing the number of support tickets and reducing the demand on support staff.

18. Beat the GMAT

Gamification Use: User Engagement, Goal Tracking and Competition

Beat the GMAT, a social network for prospective MBAs as they research and navigate the MBA admissions process,

was started by an MBA student from his dorm room at Stanford in 2005. Acquired by Hobson’s in 2012, it had already

been experimenting with gamification since 2010. With badge reward systems for engagement, simple games with

points and level systems, Beat the GMAT eventually realized its team needed to focus its efforts on core business

operations and became one of Badgeville’s first customers. In creating MBA Watch, a social network exclusively for

applicants to pool their stats and compare themselves to others to identify areas of improvement, the company

created a richer, more engaging use of social mechanics for the benefit of users.

19. Bluewolf

Gamification Use: Employee Engagement and Motivation

Bluewolf uses gamification internally as a way to get employees more engaged and actively involved in building the

Bluewolf brand. Using Bunchball’s technology, Bluewolf created its own #GoingSocial program using a variety of

initiatives, including employee ‘Pack Profiles,’ offering points and rewards for internal and external collaboration,

publishing a blog post on the company blog, earning a Klout score of 50 or above, and other achievements. The result

is a more robust social presence for a social brand that engages potential customers and drives employee investment.

20. ChoreWars

Gamification Use: Healthy Competition, Employee Motivation

It may sound like a household chore motivator for kids, and it is – but it’s also a great tool to use in the office to get

teams more motivated to complete the more mundane tasks that need doing. With a variety of configurations, you can

use ChoreWars as a one-off contest to get employees back in action, or an ongoing program with a weekly high-score

table to award prizes to top competitors every week. ChoreWars turns any ordinary task into a fun, engaging

competition by allowing users to create characters, create chores, and go on adventures with gold and equipment.

21. Nissan – Carwings

Gamification Use: Customer Loyalty

The Nissan Carwings program, a concept created by Nissan Innovation for the Nissan Leaf, Nissan’s 100-percent

electric car, gamifies driving and draws customers like magnets. With a regional rankings dashboard, owners can

compare their performance to other local drivers, earn bronze, silver, and gold medals – or for the most impressive

performance rankings, a fancy platinum award. A complimentary service for three years for new Leaf owners,

Carwings does much more than just ranks your driving stats on a leaderboard. You can communicate with your car via

your smartphone and get reminders, start charging the battery, set timers, turn on the A/C and more, even if you’re not

near your car at the time.

22. Tongal

Gamification Use: Fostering Creativity, Connecting Brands with Creative Talent

Tongal is a community of brands and creative minds that benefit in different ways through a crowd-sourced model that

makes use of gamification to foster creativity and put top-notch creative work that connects brands with their

audiences in powerful, meaningful ways. The community votes on ideas for submitted projects, and winning creators

are paid to create their vision, and the final submitted work is ranked by the Sponsor and distributed to audiences

worldwide. It’s a win-win solution that puts earning power in the hands of the world’s most brilliant minds, while

providing leading brands with access to innovative creative works that otherwise may never come to life.

23. Progress Wars

Gamification Use: Parody, Brainstorming and Stress Relief

Progress Wars isn’t really designed for business, but its total simplicity, parody approach, and potential usefulness for

business purposes is intriguing enough for us to include it here. Poking fun at the thrill of playing games on Facebook

and leveling-up to see the all-important progress bar make its way further to the right, Progess Wars is literally that: A

progress bar, completed by clicking a button to complete various “missions.” But what about business? It’s a great

distractor when you need a temporary moment of bliss, and the various challenge messages can help clear your head

when you need some added creativity. If your team is struggling with progress on an important project, a few minutes

of Progress Wars can trick your brain into thinking you’ve got your mojo back. Return to mundane, frustrating project

and start getting stuff done. End of story.

24. SCVNGR

Gamification Use: Building Brand Awareness, Team Building

SCVNGR is a fun game platform that sends users to places they’d frequent anyway, where they complete challenges,

accumulate points, and earn rewards. Get in the game by creating challenges at your favorite local places, set up a

trek for your team and force them to do goofy things in public, and more with SCVNGR. For example, a thread in the

community help desk forum suggests that SCVNGR could be used at a conference as a method for getting attendees

to engage with vendors by visiting vendor booths and participating in challenges in exchange for a reward. Whether

you set up challenges at your physical location and offer rewards or use SCVNGR for team-building purposes, this

app has tons of potential.

25. The Email Game

Gamification Use: Brand Awareness, Team Building, Productivity

Baydin creates tools that help its customers make better decisions and handle massive email influx more efficiently

than ever before with The Email Game. Using gamification to boost productivity, The Email Game gives users a 3-

minute time limit to respond to emails that must be addressed now and rewards you with points and accomplishments

when you’ve done things quickly or managed your workflow well. While The Email Game’s gamification approach

benefits Baydin by fostering customer loyalty, but its enterprise edition can help your team become more productive

and have more fun managing email at the office.

We love seeing great examples of gamification in use. Got one? Share it with us!