Discover how gamification can boost user engagement and satisfaction in your B2B software or app.
People are wired for games—and they always have been. Our thirst for dopamine hits and the thrill of victory has powered the gaming industry from the analog era into the 350 billion-dollar beast it is today.
Sure, games are fun. But what makes gamification powerful in B2B applications is its ability to enhance productivity and engagement. By tapping into the powerful psychological principles behind play and competition, gamification can boost employee engagement by 60%, and self-reported productivity among 90% of employees.
Although gamification has been trending in B2B apps for a while, successfully implementing it is an art that requires research and experience. If you’re ready to level up and learn about the do’s and don’ts of B2B gamification, we’ve got you covered. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the essentials of gamification in B2B SaaS and reveal the key strategies you’ll need to implement it.
What is gamification? And how it motivates B2B users
Gamification integrates gaming elements into non-game contexts to improve engagement and motivate certain behaviors. Gamification relies on 3 key principles:
🎮 Game mechanics
🧠 Behavioral psychology
🏆 Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Users get directives and feedback through game mechanics, which can include points, levels, leaderboards, badges, and more. While these are the visual features we see on the surface level of gamification, there’s a deeper psychological basis behind them. Gamification works by tapping into our brain’s reward system, particularly through dopamine release along specific neural pathways. By releasing chemicals that help create positive emotions, this system encourages us to repeat actions that lead to positive outcomes.
What’s special about gaming is that it gives us the thrill of having control (or the impression of it) over these rewards—whether real money, company swag, or badges in an app’s digital token economy. Even the mere chance of winning is often enough to entice us to play. In the case of gaming, research has conclusively shown that just like a great meal, a pay raise, or winning in “real” sports, video games create massive spikes in dopamine release.
Beyond physical rewards, humans have intrinsic desires to master concepts and overcome challenges. These internal catalysts also encourage us to volunteer, learn new skills, or engage in activities without obvious rewards. The most successful gamification strategies balance these intrinsic motivators with external rewards like payments, trophies, and prizes.
What is the value of gamification in B2B software?
Gamification has proven effective in a wide range of B2B contexts. It consistently enhances user engagement and can make routine or mundane flows like onboarding easier. But when it comes to the value of gamification, the numbers speak for themselves:
Companies that gamify employee tasks are 7x more profitable than those that don’t.
72% of employees think gamification helps them complete more tasks at work.
54% of new hires report being more productive after gamified onboarding.
69% of workers are more likely to stay at a job for 3+ years when tasks are gamified.
Beyond boosting profitability, employee retention, and productivity, gamification can improve user adoption and prevent drop-off. Making complex tasks more fun during onboarding helps familiarize users with robust tools that can seem intimidating at first glance. In addition, gamification’s engaging nature helps keep churn rates low and increases customer satisfaction.
In a B2B context, gamification can have far-reaching benefits that impact nearly every aspect of software and web apps. In the next sections, we’ll delve into specific strategies to ensure gamification delivers results for you and your clients.
How to define your user types
You can and should tailor the gamification experience for your target market. Understanding your user types and personas will help you tap into the right motivators that drive different employee segments. This is a great opportunity to leverage previous market or UX research to create more targeted gamification strategies.
For example, you may find that sales professionals are motivated by financial incentives and competition. If that’s the case, implementing a gamification system that rewards top performers with bonuses or recognition could resonate with and motivate that user type further.
On the other hand, you may have users who are more driven by education and innovation, like an R&D or engineering team. Gamified challenges that encourage continued learning and reward innovative solutions are likely to be more effective with that subgroup.
How to strategically align with business workflows
Incorporating gamification in your product’s design should align seamlessly with the specific business workflows your software or app addresses. Introducing gamified elements should enhance, not detract from, the user experience.
You want to avoid adding features that clutter the user interface or introduce additional, unnecessary tasks. While it might be tempting to add gamified elements to your product, you can risk alienating users if you fail to logically integrate the features in a way that helps them accomplish real-life tasks. However, when successful, gamification can add tangible value and aid users in accomplishing their objectives (i.e. their work) more effectively.
How to select the right gamification strategies
There are many gamification strategies you can incorporate into your B2B SaaS product. Choosing the most effective elements will depend on your target customers and the software you're developing.
Points, badges, and leaderboards
Incorporating points, badges, and leaderboards can encourage continuous learning and professional development among users. These visual signals give users a sense of where they stand and serve as clear and trackable external rewards. As we mentioned earlier, although people will already have a certain level of intrinsic motivation, tying in these extrinsic motivators can make tasks more dynamic and rewarding.
When we collaborated with Vivint, they wanted to make fielding sales calls more dynamic and exciting for internal sales representatives. To accomplish this, we designed a new portal that used points, badges, and a leaderboard to promote collective improvement.
Progress tracking and goal setting
No matter how you allocate points, trophies, or other external markers of success, you need to give users clear ways to set goals and track their progress toward them. In today’s fast-paced business environments, helping set and track clear goals prevents decision fatigue, improves focus, and makes progress easier. Doing so guides employees and gives managers real-time performance feedback, improving productivity and clarifying decision-making.
Workforce, a white-labeled B2B HR management company, wanted a better platform for understanding the sentiment amongst hourly workforces while also tracking hiring and retention goals. Neuron updated their platform with a more streamlined, user-friendly architecture that allowed for intuitive real-time feedback and clearer performance indicators.
User onboarding
Not sure where to start including gamification in an app or web experience? If you’ve ever demoed sophisticated B2B software or even played a complex video game for the first time, it’s common to encounter an interactive tutorial of some kind.
For many, learning complex tasks can be overwhelming or boring. By leveraging the stimulating capabilities of gamification, companies can make user onboarding feel more fun, and less like taking notes in school. Typically, apps or software will use a system of guided tours and tutorials to let learners move through the material comfortably and at their own pace. Often, they receive rewards for completing onboarding steps until they’re ready to graduate to the real thing.
Challenges and competitions
Challenges and competitions are powerful motivators for certain subsets of users within B2B gamification. For sales teams, challenges can tap the natural competitive spirit of those groups to drive performance.
You can integrate challenges and competitions into existing leaderboards or point systems you’ve already built. For example, in addition to assigning points for regularly meeting sales targets, you could create a high-stakes, time-limited sales competition allowing users to gain extra rewards, trophies, or badges. Displaying a leaderboard will naturally encourage some level of competition, but integrating challenges can up the ante.
In addition to creating a clear reward structure for Vivint, we ensured their dashboard had a dedicated space for tracking performance on one-off and recurring contests.
Social collaboration and features
Collaboration through gamification helps build community within your B2B SaaS product. Gamification can increase social interaction, especially with the inherently social aspects of leaderboards, head-to-head competition, and splitting groups into teams. Including opportunities for social interaction within gamified elements is a great way to make those experiences feel richer and more rewarding.
Personalized learning paths
Gamification is a good way to customize knowledge or skill development for learners. There are many different types of learning styles due to individual differences in ability, interests, and motivation.
Because of this, games must adapt to the player's ability and interests. For example, you can increase the difficulty of a game in response to high performance or decrease it if users appear to be struggling. If you want users to stay engaged, you need to meet them where they are to avoid discouragement or boredom.
How to tie gamification to your business goals
Earlier, we discussed the importance of tying gamification to real business workflows. Similarly, effective gamification must also be connected to real business goals..
Define your objectives
To link gamification to your UX goals effectively, start by clearly defining those goals. Without a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, any gamification effort lacks direction and purpose. Identify key objectives such as:
Increasing user adoption: Encourage more users to start using your product.
Improving productivity and efficiency: Streamline workflows to save time and effort.
Enhancing user engagement: Make tasks and workflows more engaging.
Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for gamification
After identifying your goals, you must define how to measure progress toward achieving them. Ultimately, one of gamification's biggest benefits is how it makes tasks and workflows feel more engaging. Not surprisingly, one common strategy for measuring progress is looking at engagement metrics, which could include:
Active users: The number of users actively engaging with the product.
Feature adoption rate: The percentage of users adopting new features or functionalities.
Session frequency: How often users interact with your product.
Task completion time and success rate: The time taken to complete tasks and the success rate of those tasks.
You can also track the impact on more specific user behaviors. For example, if one of your goals to incorporate gamification was to increase the number of employees who complete certain training modules, you can look at completion numbers over time.
In addition to engagement tracking, gamification often results in a more positive user experience. That’s why it’s often worth tracking not only what they do, but how they feel about your product. You can do this through qualitative surveys that capture indicators such as net promoter score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
Iterate for ongoing optimization
Almost any app can be improved once you see how users engage with it. Intentional optimization will help you get the best results from gamification.
A/B testing is one effective technique for evaluating the effectiveness of gamification elements. For example, you might want to determine if users respond better to a progress bar or a point system. Based on the data, you can then adapt your strategies, improve your performance, and reach your goals faster. While you can use other techniques to get even more granular data, A/B tests will at least tell you which version of a design users prefer overall.
Level up your B2B product with gamification
By incorporating gamification into your B2B SaaS product, you can use the systems baked into human psychology to drive the behavior you want in users. We’ve talked a lot about gamification's benefits. But in our mind, what makes gamification so special is that its benefits can work synergistically to produce big-picture outcomes, like boosting revenue, employee retention, and reputation.
Neuron can help you strategize, design, and implement effective gamification features into your new or existing product. Specializing in designing world-class business and enterprise tools, we pride ourselves on collaborating authentically with clients to bring their ideas to life.
Ready to develop a gamification solution that solves your customers' pain points? Reach out to our team to start designing your UX/UI gamification solution today.