Badgeville For Salesforce Boasts 'Native' Gamification

Sales managers seeking to set challenges for their teams and reward progress toward those goals will be able to do so from within Salesforce.com's customer relationship management system with the Gamification platform player Badgeville for Salesforce app announced this week.

As the Dreamforce user conference gets under way in San Francisco, Badgeville is one of many cloud computing companies looking to associate themselves with the firm that invented the category. Badgeville's product is a Web service for gamification and other techniques for influencing behavior that can be integrated with other websites and applications. By launching an app on the Salesforce.com AppExchange, tied to the gamification service, Badgeville is making it easier to craft a program for tracking salesperson performance, with badges for achievement displayed in the Salesforce CRM user interface and broadcast to the sales team on Chatter.

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In addition to driving sales, the gamification app is designed to achieve results such as improved data quality, because users are more likely to win recognition if they update lead and customer records more diligently; and boosted collaboration, as team members see each other's recognitions reflected in Chatter. Points toward goals can be tracked at both the individual and team levels.

Competitor Bunchball introduced a Salesforce.com integration a year ago and will be announcing an update this week.

Chandar Pattabhiram, VP of worldwide marketing at Badgeville, said one distinction is that Badgeville's version is actually not limited to the sales process but can be applied to any business process managed through the Salesforce.com platform. Effective use of gamification "is not about picking one app and trying to gamify that" but about establishing "touchpoints" across the enterprise for reinforcing desired behaviors, he said.

Badgeville also has created a more "native" experience by building on Force.com, the Salesforce.com developer platform, he said. That doesn't mean Badgeville has rewritten all its software on Force.com, but it has created an administrator's control panel in that environment. Instead of having to log into an external website to manage challenges or evaluate progress in the gamification system, authorized users will be able to perform those administrative tasks from within Salesforce.com.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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