Gamification in the workplace: supercharging the employee experience to drive productivity (part 5: Explorers)

Bartle’s ‘Explorers’ player type is characterised as a group of people who enjoy the journey towards completing a task as well as collecting information. Here's how to tailor technology - such as Oracle CRM solutions - using gamification, in order to meet an Explorer’s employee experience (EX) needs and boost productivity.

If you haven’t already read my introductory blog post to the Oracle CRM gamification series, including a summary of Bartle’s four player types, you can read it here.

The Explorers: Not all those who wander are lost #

Explorers love to discover and expand their horizons. They are characterised by enjoying open-ended work and the process, not just the completion. They form a key minority of the population, estimated to be about 10%.

They thrive in open-ended areas where there is potential for unpredictability and their innate curiosity means that, when given a degree of freedom during their search for information, they will venture further than others.

Many developers (whether developing software or physical products) are explorers. Furthermore, leaders and analysts typically enjoy diving into detail and find new pieces of information that trigger new paths.

Now, let’s take a look at some examples of how a CRM, such as Oracle’s Engagement Cloud or Oracle’s Siebel Open UI applications, can be tailored with UX at the forefront, to meet the character traits of the Explorers in the workplace.

Heatseekers #

Liam is a senior customer service manager in a US-based cell phone network. The company’s marketing is focused around being the best in the industry for customer service, especially against no-thrills, budget providers.

However, there has been a rise in customers leaving the network in direct correlation with an increase in poor reviews. Liam sees this as a large complex issue and he wants to dive into the information to see how it can help his firm better satisfy customers.

In his department’s CRM, they have access to a map visualisation of customer satisfaction calculated as number of service tickets per 1000 customers. Green areas have very low number of tickets per customer whereas red have much higher. From here, Liam can drill into these areas and see visualization of the average times to solve tickets and recurring issues.

Liam loves to see how these indicators vary over time and uses them as a launch pad during discussions with regional managers.

Idea zone #

Amelia works in the marketing department of a massive food conglomerate. They run periodic campaigns via their Siebel CRM and are constantly in need of new and fresh ideas. The company wants to encourage their best creative minds to think across their product range and to share their ideas at inception. This would allow the team in charge of a product easy access to a vast repository of the team’s organic ideas, useful when considering what’s to be included in the next marketing campaign.

Below is an example of a CRM dashboard for the marketing user which uses gamification.

The idea button in the top right corner allows the user to easily record ideas in a pop out window whenever the ideas come to her. These create records in an idea zone where she can peruse through to find inspiration.

One size doesn't fit all #

Explorers are fascinated by the world around them and want to learn everything they can. However, it’s important to be aware that explorers only form a small portion of the workforce. Other CRM environments may need to be more objective focused rather than explorative, so a whole different take on gamification should be considered.

Be sure to check in for the other instalments in this blog series which look at Explorers, Achievers and Socialisers, and see if these apply to you or your team!