Bunchball, a vendor of gamification solutions, announced a new release of its Nitro for Salesforce product. The new release extends Bunchchall’s game mechanics service organizations using the Salesforce Service Cloud. This release makes Nitro for Salesforce the only fully integrated gamification solution available from within the Salesforce Service Cloud and Sales Cloud.

The product uses motivational techniques like goal-setting, real-time feedback, competition, and virtual rewards to engage and motivate service agents. For example, members of the service team can be rewarded for achieving various productivity milestones like training course completions. The solution is also integrated with Saleforce Chatter which lets users manage social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Like it or not, gamification is here to stay and help bolster user engagement. Employee engagement has become the holy grail in private companies and government agencies, as numerous studies show that engaged employees are far more productive, and stay longer than their non-engaged peers. Companies are increasingly using gamification to reward and recognize both their trading partners and their employees.

When gamification capabilities are added to social software, the idea is for companies to access data and analytics that should provide much needed insight into employee behavior, and then reward employees in a way that increases their commitment to what they are doing while also keeping them aligned with company goals. To that end, Socialtext, a renowned provider of enterprise social software, announced its partnership with Badgeville, the leading gamification and behavior management platform, to infuse gamification capabilities into its variety of applications, widgets, and mobile tools.

Read the rest of this entry »

Zurmo has released a new version of its Open Source CRM. The  0.7.5 version offers new social CRM elements, the option to add profile pictures, and custom lists while searching. One new feature worth underlining is Mission—a new gamification component that invites “co-workers to challenge one another in exchange for a reward.” In fact, Mission proposes a unified vision of all customer interactions within an organization by displaying each department’s customer conversations to other departments.