First defined by Nick Pelling in 2002, Gamification has become a broadly understood term in business to explain game like behavior which can be transferred to non-gaming situations in order to drive customer, employee and product engagement. Targeting the brain’s reward centers, gamification techniques satisfy unique human desires such as self-expression, altruism, competition, a sense of socialization and status recognition among peers.
Why Gamification in Portals
Gamification is assuming a substantial role in web marketing strategies and brand promotion. Gone are the days when you could connect with your target audience solely based on elegant website layouts and rich content; today, in order to increase adoption of enterprise portals while fostering productivity and collaboration, businesses must endeavor to bring something different to the table. This new approach in thinking calls for user experience (covering 3 aspects for end users: illustrative, informative and interactive) rather than how much information can be jam-packed into your website platform.
The reason being portals are no longer one-dimensional entities with a monolith purpose of attracting web traffic; there are versatile portal applications today such as intranet/extranet sites, media platform, social networking communities, supplier and partner portals and websites requiring integration with external applications meeting the objectives of niche end user segments be it employees, customers or partners.
In the current business climate, gamification in web portals has proved a tried and tested strategy to convert your enterprise portal to tangible business assets. The whole idea is to leverage game-based design principles, processes and systems to influence, engage and motivate individual, groups and communities so that these portals can drive targeted behavior and affect desired outcome in terms of user adoption – a few methods to do so include creative branding, easier search and navigation, videos and comments, faster call-to-action and greater personalization.
How Liferay fits within the Gamification picture
One of the biggest strengths of Liferay portal is its open standards-based web services and integration platform which can flexibly integrate various existing applications into a single unified user experience; apart from other business applications like ECM (Alfresco, Documentum), BPM (Intalio), ERP (SAP), CRM (Salesforce, SugarCRM), 3rd party gamification engines such as Bunchball Nitro, Badgeville and Gamify can also be plugged into your Liferay portal.
The output appearance is captivating to end users, e.g. hosting an attractive branded game on your homepage or mobile app downloads is a sure way to gamify site visitors building sustained interaction, taking user engagement at a whole new level.
If employees are your end users, you can gamify by making them earn reward points through frequent site visits, online trainings, video views, participation in quizzes and discussion forums thereby, increasing collaboration through healthy competition and participation. Aiming for top performers or making it into the leaderboard makes people more interested in associating with a specific brand or an organizational activity.
Benefits of Gamification in Enterprise Portals
CIGNEX has implemented gamification into a portal platform for a leading travel and hospitality client; based on client’s experience, we have seen measurable benefits which percolate different areas of business.
The tangible benefits included a greater traction in terms of time spent by users on website and completing challenges and surveys. The client employed gamification to rope in its global network of corporate and franchisee sales reps to sell hotel meeting rooms space through a common meeting point portal; this led to more than 70 unique visitors per week, more than 3000 challenges completed per week and users spending half of their time on the portal discussions forums.
Intangible benefits in portal gamification included enterprise-level collaboration, improved user management, faster return on investment, improved quality and timeliness of data and reduced learning curve for end users.
Interested in knowing more about this implementation? Click here to download our webinar presentation on meeting point portal.
