Enterprise Gamification: Communicate Business Goals, Include Narratives and Reinforce Learning Experiences
As e-learning becomes more prevalent, game-based learning is also growing. E-learning gamification introduces a variety of gaming elements —badges, leaderboards, scores and achievements — to e-courses, making it more enjoyable and engaging. This process helps address the diverse learning requirements of onboarding, soft skills training, customer service, product sales and marketing. Game-based learning motivates employees to participate in a learning program, complete tasks and receive recognition for their achievements. It also works in competitive scenarios when aligned with business goals.
Kahn’s Theory of Learner Engagement
Gamification is the use of gaming components in a non-game context to drive engagement and motivation. Modern learner behavior is influenced by the interactive gaming experience. Organizational goals can be achieved through intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. This is where the significance of gamification comes into existence by giving points comprised of intrinsic (collecting badges) and extrinsic (gaining recognition) components. Learner engagement is the expression of the ‘preferred self’ in tasks that support optimal work performances.
Kahn’s concept of engagement is related to motivation as it involves bringing personal resources to improve performance in the workplace. As a whole, learner engagement includes effort, flow and participation, so engagement during gamified e-learning is identical to autonomous motivation attained through utmost dedication and absorption.
Following Best Practices to Improve Your Gamification Experience
Optimum customer service is crucial for any business and enterprise. Making it a key element of their workplace training strategy assures positive results. Gamification is not merely playing; it’s using game mechanics to boost individual behavior. It imparts employees with increased levels of engagement, transparency, recognition and instant feedback.
Let’s discuss how gamified learning works in a customer service environment:
- Choosing the right game mechanics
Selecting the right game mechanics and best metrics to measure employee success is crucial. Game mechanics in e-learning should include:
- Collection of points, scores and badges upon completion of specific levels.
- Competition among peers with benchmarks and averages.
- Karma points and certifications for knowledge collaboration.
Some of the key drivers for an engaging gamified learning experience should be:
- Increasing employee job satisfaction, collaboration and retention.
- Decreasing average handling time with increased first-call resolution.
- Improving skills competency so that workforce can move across customer service channels(chat, email and phone).
- Using narratives
For gamified learning, engaging narratives impart an experience that adapts a storytelling approach to structured learning. A narrative framework can include badges, scripts, ‘how to play’ text and more. It helps learners engage and communicate more effectively. In some cases, learners choose their own game elements and do better in measuring metrics to achieve optimized training outcomes.
- Increasing scope of automation
In traditional classroom-based training, a marker is used to write scores on leaderboards, based on supervisors’ analysis of employees’ performance. There was no strong motivation and no process to provide immediate feedback. Using gamification tactics, automation helps enterprises in a number of ways:
- Automated update system helps provide periodic leaderboards and other feedback mechanisms.
- Recognition drives employee engagement and satisfaction. Gamification helps recognition of top talent, their progress as a team and more. This increases the feeling of appreciation and encouragement among the employees.
- Games embedded with mobile apps enable on-the-go learning with immediate performance feedback.
- Rather than asking modern workers to attend classroom sessions, gamification incorporated with on-the-job training imparted during times of performance deterioration adds improvement.
- Communicating gamification
During the gamified learning process, repeatedly connecting with employees on business goals, expectations and results is quite significant. By setting game rules with learners, organizations communicate the behavior expected of them. Not interacting with an enterprise gamification project may lead to increased risk from poor adoption.
- Implementing for onboarding process
The employee onboarding process is not merely the time taken by an employee to become proficient; it also affects turnover time and boosts engagement during the initial phase of the job. If the onboarding process includes video games, contests and more, it’s bound to be more engaging and effective.
- Fixing performance failure with training
Customer service employees may exhibit performance failure. Gamification can help refresh their training. They can play a game again and re-earn points, which motivates them to perform better while seeking improvement.
E-learning gamification for enterprise has a vast scope in the domain of customer service. Game mechanics can track individual performance and feedback to boost both corporate results and workforce efficiency. Gamification motivates users to actively participate and solve critical problems. Sales programs, onboarding and internal training sessions require a great deal of collaboration, so adding gamification elements make them challenging and rewarding for the new-age workforce.
Author: Anubha Goel, G-Cube
Anubha Goel is a content writer at G-Cube. She loves to write about new technologies in the eLearning industry and exploring fresh ideas for new-age learners.
Suggested Further Reading: https://www.gameffective.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/customer-service-gamification-white-paper.pdf
