Top
Back to Blog
Thought about gamification as a business strategy? article image

Thought about gamification as a business strategy?

Post by |

There are many examples of the use of gamification in business today to improve business performance, inspire innovation, enhance customer engagement and drive change in organisations. Most common use of the concept is found in employee wellness initiatives, timely project completion, customer loyalty and many others.

Have you ever thought about leveraging the concept in your firm? You can actively adopt gamification as a business strategy to help meet business goals. In fact, workflow technology, which is already well-entrenched for the efficiency benefits it provides, has the potential to facilitate a ‘gamification’ approach to business. The concept isn’t that far removed from the current way of thinking in the legal sector. League tables are already seen as the definitive indicator of how well a law firm is doing. Many of you deploy analytics tools to identify which aspects of the business are working well and where there may be scope for improvement.

The simplest way is to exploit your existing workflow technology is to provide real-time, business metrics-related league tables. For example, a dynamic league table in your core technology/business management system that tracks and compares the revenue generation plans of all practice areas can be useful. The table could list all the firm’s customers by practice area, current revenue levels of each customer along with projected revenue streams. Aside from flagging up the gaps between actual and projected revenue levels, such insight could potentially throw up ideas for cross-selling and even for developing new and innovative business offerings to help achieve your revenue targets.

Using the concept of gamification within CRM, you can quantify your key client management. You can measure based on individual employee personal development and performance goals, and create dynamic risk analysis tables (drawing data from the CRM, practice management, HR and other business systems) to monitor customer engagement and satisfaction in real-time.

For human resource management, you can use gamification to positively showcase individual achievements of employees who bring in new business, cross-sell services, proactively deliver ideas for service improvements, participate in firm-wide initiatives and such – all measured against their personal development goals and ambitions.

You get the picture – the possibilities are endless. Ultimately, you can extend the idea to monitor any kind of metric or business function using workflow technology and analytics. This ‘live’ methodology for tracking business performance will enable you to be proactive across all facets of the business operation. Crucially, it will facilitate early risk identification – be it related to key client relationships, talent and skills available (or lack of), revenue projections and overall business performance.

Equally, gamification can help with measuring the qualitative side of the business. So using game mechanics where the ‘player’ – a case handler, supervisor, secretary, etc. – is automatically awarded points and badges for recognition for best practice within specific cases, sharing insight with colleagues, successfully completing training and education courses and so on.

The objective and value of a gamification approach to business is continuous incremental improvement, enabling the organisation to constantly push up the minimum acceptable level of performance – by serving as a supportive tool that alerts the firm to doing things better.

About the Author:


Nigel has led the product function since 2013 and has worked with Visualfiles since it was first released. With wide experience the legal sector, including Head of IT in 2 separate law firms, before joining Solicitec in 2004, he has also worked in the NHS and served for 9 years in the RAF, in the UK and overseas. Outside of work, Nigel lives in Gloucestershire and is married with 3 grown up daughters. He is a long-suffering Gloucester Rugby season ticket holder, hoping rather than expecting! Aside from the rugby, Nigel is a qualified hockey umpire and a keen photographer.

| See all our contributors
Back to Blog