Michael Fitzgerald explains Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game:
Work is not play. But maybe it should be.In fact, Paul Johnston has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game. Mr. Johnston is not some awkward adolescent, but the polished president and chief executive of Entellium, which makes software for customer relationship management. Businesses spend billions of dollars on such software to try to track their sales staff, their marketers, their customer service — anything that connects them with customers. Unfortunately, most of the software is the business equivalent of calorie counting. No one does it gladly. Worse, the software has a Big Brother aspect to it.
“C.R.M. software is designed to let your manager peek at you,” Mr. Johnston says. He notes that even at Entellium, based in Seattle, he has had trouble getting his sales staff to update their data consistently. Reasoning that sales people are wildly competitive, he thought that they would respond to a program that showed where they stood against their goals — or their peers’. Hence, Rave, which Entellium introduced in April.
Rave adapts a variety of gaming techniques. For instance, you can build a dossier of your clients and sales prospects that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests, much like the character descriptions in many video games. Prospects are given ratings, not by how new they are — common in C.R.M. programs — but by how likely they are to buy something. All prospects are also tracked on a timeline, another gamelike feature.
Rave isn’t exactly the business version of Madden N.F.L., at least not yet. But Craig K. Hall, president of Logos Marketing Inc., a graphics company in Albany, said it reminded him of video games he has played, like the Legend of Zelda. Mr. Hall, 31, says he likes the way Rave pops up information, including news that will matter to clients. He also said its use of sales stages and checklists, also borrowed from the way games progress through levels, had helped him rethink the way his company operates. “They’ve done a good job of it,” he said.