A tale about how tech support Veeam introduced gamification
As was found in all decent stories of successful implementation, it all began more with random phrases and conversations in the kitchen than with careful study of the idea, in-depth analysis of the situation and implementation options in the current conditions. Personal initiative, involvement in the process and unhealthy shine in the eyes bring much more fruit than even the most interesting, but imposed task from above. We will talk about this today as in the Veeam company, in the technical support department of products (the largest department after sales representatives, by the way) was successfully introduced such an exotic beast as gamification for us.
Gamification for us did not become a magic pill, turning everything into a blooming garden, as it seems to some specialists. her task is not at all in this. She only allowed to solve the problems that are really designed to solve.
And no magic, only sleight of hand.
')
You should not look for a set of specific recipes and solutions under the cut, since we want to describe the path we have traveled and the most important milestones on it that all those who are thinking about introducing game mechanics in their company or department have to go.
First of all, we define what is gamification for us. Judging by the information in Runet in general, and on Habré in particular, you might get the impression that gamification is a kind of magic wand that can be brought to any ashes, waved a couple of times, clapping hands, legs top and everything will spin like and happiness will come to all. That's just need to wave it in some completely mystical way, accompanying each stroke with another portion of money. And the main rule - do not leave the sales department! Gamification works only in sales!
Or, if we speak a little more seriously, now, from the height of the distance traveled, we can state with certainty that there is no adequate or adapted information in the runet (or almost none), and the one that exists sometimes makes us crouch under the bed and cry. The lack of a description of practical solutions, or at least implementation methodologies, is particularly acute.
Unfortunately, in this area we are very well behind our Western colleagues, so today we want to share our experience in the practical application of gamification ideas and hope that it will be useful to someone.
We will not talk about mythical ideas, but about a specific tool that has been successfully mastered and applied to solve the set tasks. He did not solve all the problems, because and is not meant to do that. In our case, we provided engineers with the opportunity to distract from routine work processes (for, as you know, the best rest is a change of activity), providing them with an accessible tool for analyzing and comparing their performance, and, as a result, increased their overall involvement in the work process. And the management of the department, for its part, received a flexible tool for soft management of employee behavior and a set of unique metrics for analysis. Agree that sounds tempting.
When any company is rapidly developing across all horizons, not only the resources of all its departments increase in proportion, but a completely new kind of problems appear that simply cannot manifest themselves until a certain moment. In our case, this moment was a complex phenomenon, but the crucial event was destined to become the release of a new release of our flagship product Veeam Backup & Replication, then at number 7.
On the one hand, it was a great time for a post-sale sales surge with an expected increase in the number of requests for technical support. It’s just that expectations were diverged from reality, and the moment of control over the flow of appeals was frankly missed, as a result of which new employees did not have time to complete a full-fledged course of a young fighter and unresolved chicks threw their breasts at the embrasure, while the old fighters were holding back the attack on all fronts . It was really a difficult period, and people began to burn out. The quality of their work, as a technical staff, did not fall, but the letters more and more resembled the pattern answers of robots, and the client’s waiting time on the phone grew steadily. At some point, the execution of applications began to resemble a conveyor for sending letters of the same type, and the entire department began to exist on the principle of work-time_to_son-work. It became obvious that the time has come for a change.
Here we need to make a small remark about our favorite department and explain what principles are laid in the foundation of his work. I will also talk about what goals we set for ourselves, in addition to the obvious desire to solve technical difficulties encountered by clients as quickly and efficiently as possible.
On Habré, there were already several articles on technical support for Veeam ( link once , link two ), and those who are interested in learning more can refer to them, but briefly, we are very proud of our level of customer satisfaction (metric with ambiguously translatable name Customer satisfaction). According to estimates based on reviews that customers can leave after completing each case, we have this level confidently at the level of 98% - 99%, which is a very high figure for the industry. In practice, this means that, first of all, we work with a specific person, and not with an impersonal problem. We need an aftertaste that remains with the customer after contacting technical support. Such an attitude gives the client a sense of engineer involvement in his particular case and increases mutual comfort during a conversation, since Initially, all customers are somewhat annoyed.
Measuring the level of customer satisfaction from contacting an international support service is, quite frankly, not a trivial task. This is not the level of sales that can be measured with a ruler. It can not be measured by the number of positive reviews because, for example, the Spaniards, all as one, write reviews, and they are much more important what the engineer said, while the server rebooted than the quality of the information received. On the other hand, from the IT specialists of the CIS space reviews come only in case of customer dissatisfaction. To write positive reviews with us, apparently, is still not accepted. Therefore, we have to spin and invent a weighted evaluation method.
So, at that time we had a department numbering about 40 engineers, the average age did not exceed 25 years, absolutely everything is technically remarkably well-versed, fluent in several languages, intelligent, ambitious and, as it turned out later, they like to meet innovations like true sample introverts - with a huge suspicion
The department should be developed, and there is no way to allow personnel turnover due to the moral fatigue of engineers. That is why it is very important to monitor the involvement of engineers in the work, not allowing the working day to become a set of routine operations that can kill all the desire to return to the office the next day with amazing speed. Sometimes a week is enough to completely burn out a person.
Contrary to popular belief, it is impossible to artificially increase employee motivation. If he is tired of his field of work, then soon he will stop doing it, and, if not completely, but his productivity will drop to a minimum. It is useless to raise his salary, to promise arbitrarily tempting bonuses and buns. These are all temporary measures. Increasing the level of motivation of technical specialists through external vanity tools is a myth, it can only be dropped to the plinth, so forget about increasing motivation.
On the other hand, the management of the department needs a tool that allows them to quietly peek at the activity of their employees, draw conclusions and gently stifle problems that arise in the bud. Traditional metrics cannot provide this data, since they give insufficiently operational "average temperature in the hospital." It is possible to record all the actions of an engineer very meticulously, but how to compare the performance of a theoretical engineer who opens a lot of logs, issues a solution and writes a detailed letter with instructions for correcting it with the performance of a practical engineer who makes it easier to call and configure everything yourself than to write multi-volume letters - science is not known. But there are still appeals that promise half a day on the phone, or questions about finding the right paragraph in the documentation. In a word, the standard quantitative indicators, which are diligently imposed on sales departments, are not applicable for the case of support.
So, the problem was there, and we had to solve it. It was a great time when trial and error was the rule. Even the most insane ideas were successfully introduced into the production process, and generally accepted international practices turned out to be either not applicable at all, or simply did not work due to such reasons as mentality.
It was in this situation, during one of the meetings, that someone mentioned the topic of today's article. We tried to discuss the idea, but it turned out that besides the name and some fragmentary knowledge at the level of definition, no one knows anything from wikipedia. Everyone just heard something about the introduction of game mechanics, achivki, points and the fact that it is very healthy and good.
Well, they talked, okay, but, as always, there was one person whom the idea hooked and who subsequently developed the idea before his combat enthusiasm. For which he thanks a lot from all of us.
Immediately there was a problem, indicated at the very beginning of the article - a terrible lack of information. Almost informational hunger. Everything that could somehow shed light on implementation practices was googled, but it soon became clear that, apart from general descriptive articles and elementary truths, nothing sensible could be found.
The only thing that was noteworthy was the recording of the speech of Aliya Rakimgulova (which can be easily found on the open spaces of the network), where she very well described a real example of implementation.
And when the first notes of the desire to quit everything started ringing, help came, from where they did not wait - a whole course on this topic was found at ousera, which started so well in the near future. To say that the knowledge gained there was invaluable, it is modestly silent. Free online learning has shown itself in all its glory. It was clear that the lecturer knew what he was talking about, so after completing the course in his head there was a set of well-structured knowledge, the right books were ordered on Amazon, and the introduction plan began to acquire the first signs of adequacy.
In total, the stage of theoretical training took about 3 months.
So, the disposition is known, the possibilities are obvious, it is time to analyze the internal processes and separate the wheat from the chaff. It is critical at this stage not only to understand what the average engineer does, but also to clearly define what we really want from him as a result of the working day: i.e. what exactly should be paid more attention, where it is possible to be simpler, and where it is not happening at all as it was intended. Such an analysis is very useful in itself, since allows you to take a sober look at the entire existing system and notice the obvious problems that for some reason have not been solved once there a long time ago, but now they exist as a given, because there is nothing more permanent than temporary solutions.
In our case, for the engineer, as a consumer of a new service, the most important factor in the success of the future enterprise was chosen the idea of absolute transparency of all processes related to gamification, which should not distract him from work, and they (background gamification processes) should be completely autonomous . No new or unnecessary actions on the part of employees should be performed.
The second important was the condition for the engineer to get feedback on the effectiveness of his work in a convenient (read: easy to understand for a mere mortal) form and having the opportunity to compare his progress with other employees. Subsequently, this gives rise to the very element of the game and competition, due to which the engineer’s involvement in performing certain tasks increases. But it is unacceptable to miss an important point - it is often wrong to measure people with absolute indicators. Bare numbers (tasks taken out of context) are often useless and even harmful, so you need to calibrate all measurable metrics according to their business specifics. The meaning of the idea is that each engineer must solve his and only his own tasks (and the plan for them may be different, since the tasks of different engineers may have different complexity), and at the end of the month see that he has completed the plan for 100 calls %, and his neighbor by 90%, and the fact that his plan was set to accept 10 calls, and his neighbor - 110, he does not need to know, in general.
According to the results of his work, the engineer must receive certain assets — Achievements (Achievements) and Points (Points). Each action brings a certain number of points, and a set of actions formed on a certain basis (take 10 phone calls, for example) brings the achievement and the number of points associated with it. Obtaining a certain set of achievements brings more valuable complex achievements, which, in turn, brings even more points. Ultimately, points can be converted into specific tangible and / or intangible benefits for employees (“rewards”).
And in the end, we don’t forget about the moment with managing people: the managers and team leaders of the department receive a very interesting set of structured metrics, which by modifying can effectively control the behavior of employees, as well as analyze their performance over a given period of time. For example, if we see that the waiting time on the phone of customers, say, from France, is increasing, we increase the number of points for taking calls from this region, thereby increasing the engineer’s interest in such calls. This is an extremely simple, but very clear example.
After the goals became clear and clearly articulated, the most interesting part began: the choice of platform.
Historically, we work in CRM Salesforce, and since one of the fundamental principles was simplicity for an engineer, we immediately abandoned the introduction of new third-party applications. Our goal was to search for a plug-in module, fully embedded in Salesforce without popups, tray icons and other husks, which distract engineers from work.
Then an ordinary sheet of white paper appeared on the scene, but a very large sheet on which was drawn a sign with a list of companies that declare that they can provide the functionality required for us. In the first sample there were 12 applicants, among which there were 2 decisions from compatriots. But, unfortunately, they were soon mercilessly sifted out along with many others.
Domestic solutions were eliminated quickly due to the lack of experience with Salesforce, which did not gain much penetration in the CIS for several reasons. And, frankly, there was a feeling that these developers just wanted to get this new experience for them for our money, without guaranteeing a result. Or guaranteeing, but only if, in case of failure, we begin to use SharePoint, for which everything is already ready for them. “Cinema and Germans” in one word.
With the European and American suppliers, the situation was more rosy, but of them were crossed out because of the absolute reluctance to change anything in their product. And this is despite the fact that any decision on gamification cannot be boxed by definition. This is always a rebuild for the customer, with the introduction and debugging. And the culprit is to blame that gamification is solely for increasing sales. Having only heard that we need to introduce our own logic of building metrics, most of them said that they are not interested, they have cool graphics with the number of sales and this is the ultimate dream for each client, and the crazy Russians again come up with something.
Then it turned out that a number of solutions represent us an unnecessary corporate social network, where employees of the company (for points and achivki) will have to communicate (in addition to Facebook and VKontakte), upload photos, send working requests to each other and discuss news. As I said above, our goal was to make gamification transparent, unobtrusive, non-distracting from work and organically integrated into the existing business process. Therefore, the idea of introducing a new “social network” was no good for us.
Several solutions were completely puzzled by the lack of any kind of process automation. In order to issue an achivka, the manager must log in and enter her data manually. To build and distribute a report - go to the system, specify the parameters and click the “generate” button, wait for the process to finish and send to the distribution address. And all hands! And such systems, it should be said, cost a lot of money, and, apparently, they are bought because they are present in the market.“The 21st century is in the courtyard!”, One cannot say otherwise.
As a result of this improvised tender, only one software company from distant America remained, which really surprised us with the desire to undertake such a non-trivial task that we needed and, as it turned out later, the idea of moving away from the classical canons of the genre so captured their entire company not a startup), that in some cases the CEO of the company did not hesitate to “correct” the system code on “live TV”, during test launches and demonstrations. In other words, they perfectly understood our ideas and agreed that the practices of one department (Sales) cannot be directly transferred to another (Support). This laid the foundation for our successful cooperation with the company IActionable.
The first head-on lump in the technical implementation stage was waiting for us in a rather unexpected place - all gaming systems do not have a free testing period. No, from the word "absolutely." They explained to us that this is such a niche feature, and no one wants to give it up. If you want to know if gamification will be useful to you, pay for the trial period and pay a lot. Nobody will agree to finance such experiments with an unknown result for big money, but the water wears away the stone, so after the negotiations we managed to achieve a result that suits both parties.
Then work began directly on introducing the gamification module into the existing business system. I think that most habrizhiteli never faced Salesforce, so I will make a small remark about this CRM. In fact, this is just a huge database that provides flexible tools for creating your own interface to access it. Thus, setting up Salesforce is not just “turning on a set of checkmarks” —it is a complete development, which, if you will, is similar to setting up a well-known accounting product for a particular company. Therefore, one cannot simply bring some code and connect it as a module to an existing system. The developers of the module, first of all, should rather tightly communicate with the developers who have customized the customer's system, and only then begin the implementation.
In our case, the whole process took almost five months, three of which were spent on testing and revision. After the completion of closed tests, when all the metrics were processed in the necessary way, a knight's move was made - the system was connected to the combat production, but only with the interface completely turned off - i.e. in fact, the engineers had already begun to use it, but they did not know it. This was the stage of the final tests, debugging and accumulation of the statistics of “the usual work of engineers” to correctly calibrate the cost of the tools.
Omitting the details of the presentation of the system to the engineers, because everything is pretty obvious here, I want to talk about the involvement of engineers in the development of the system itself. At the time of the combat launch, the filling with gamification content left much to be desired, and the guys themselves asked for “access to the body” to help fill the system with achivts, and it was decided to let them turn around. As a result, in the titles and descriptions of achivok you can find references to almost any field of interest of our employees - from games and movies, to anime and books.
Here are examples of the names of the achivements, issued for solving a certain number of cases from a particular country: Memento Mori, Big in Japan, I Fink U Freeky!, Ɐıʃɐɹʇsn∀ sǝsɐƆ 51 soʃƆ (my favorite), etc. I think it is not necessary to explain which stereotypes from which countries were taken. Were not forgotten and industry jokes, such as the canonical: I Am Putting My Screwdriver Everywhere.
Several rare and epic “heightened value achievements” have been created, which are given out not only for special successes in work, but also for simply physically difficult actions. How do you, for example, “close 10 calls from Malta”? I can say with full confidence that customers from Malta are now the most beloved and expected.
Icons were not forgotten. Every single one is drawn by the engineers of the department, and the process of their refinement continues constantly.
In general, the implementation went quite smoothly and in the expected scenario. A pre-selected group of the most active (read “playing games”) employees successfully created the necessary “noise background” and helped those who had such a new system become familiar with. A small proportion of people reacted with predictable suspicion, but soon they were also assimilated by the system with varying degrees of success.
We believe that another important goal has been achieved - no one remained indifferent.
Now, when 4 months have passed since the start of implementation, we are ready to draw some conclusions.
• Gamification is not a myth, but an excellent tool for managing business processes;
• It is impossible to carry out the introduction, without having clear goals. It is necessary to soberly assess existing problems, and whether they can be solved with the help of this tool;
• Having created a healthy competition among your employees (due to the appearance of a publicly available “leaderboard”), be prepared to be surprised at the increased productivity;
• Absolutely not applicable templates. Your specific gaming system will only work with your specific people. If from other departments they come to you with a desire to copy a ready-made solution, then be prepared to cool them down;
• Attempt to implant a game with a hot iron forcibly. Start with the most active, they will infect the rest;
• It is impossible to replace the game with real people management. There should always be a clear boundary beyond which the game ends and a dry business language begins. People need to work not for the game, but for business.
We plan to publish more detailed results in 3 months, when the initial boom finally subsides and the system enters combat mode. Then we can talk about the correctness of statistics and compare it before and after.
But if someone is interested in more detailed details regarding this or that aspect, then welcome to the comments.
Well, if there is a desire to join our friendly team - welcome to ourcareer site !
Gamification for us did not become a magic pill, turning everything into a blooming garden, as it seems to some specialists. her task is not at all in this. She only allowed to solve the problems that are really designed to solve.
And no magic, only sleight of hand.
')
You should not look for a set of specific recipes and solutions under the cut, since we want to describe the path we have traveled and the most important milestones on it that all those who are thinking about introducing game mechanics in their company or department have to go.
Agree on terminology
First of all, we define what is gamification for us. Judging by the information in Runet in general, and on Habré in particular, you might get the impression that gamification is a kind of magic wand that can be brought to any ashes, waved a couple of times, clapping hands, legs top and everything will spin like and happiness will come to all. That's just need to wave it in some completely mystical way, accompanying each stroke with another portion of money. And the main rule - do not leave the sales department! Gamification works only in sales!
Or, if we speak a little more seriously, now, from the height of the distance traveled, we can state with certainty that there is no adequate or adapted information in the runet (or almost none), and the one that exists sometimes makes us crouch under the bed and cry. The lack of a description of practical solutions, or at least implementation methodologies, is particularly acute.
Unfortunately, in this area we are very well behind our Western colleagues, so today we want to share our experience in the practical application of gamification ideas and hope that it will be useful to someone.
We will not talk about mythical ideas, but about a specific tool that has been successfully mastered and applied to solve the set tasks. He did not solve all the problems, because and is not meant to do that. In our case, we provided engineers with the opportunity to distract from routine work processes (for, as you know, the best rest is a change of activity), providing them with an accessible tool for analyzing and comparing their performance, and, as a result, increased their overall involvement in the work process. And the management of the department, for its part, received a flexible tool for soft management of employee behavior and a set of unique metrics for analysis. Agree that sounds tempting.
Prehistory
When any company is rapidly developing across all horizons, not only the resources of all its departments increase in proportion, but a completely new kind of problems appear that simply cannot manifest themselves until a certain moment. In our case, this moment was a complex phenomenon, but the crucial event was destined to become the release of a new release of our flagship product Veeam Backup & Replication, then at number 7.
On the one hand, it was a great time for a post-sale sales surge with an expected increase in the number of requests for technical support. It’s just that expectations were diverged from reality, and the moment of control over the flow of appeals was frankly missed, as a result of which new employees did not have time to complete a full-fledged course of a young fighter and unresolved chicks threw their breasts at the embrasure, while the old fighters were holding back the attack on all fronts . It was really a difficult period, and people began to burn out. The quality of their work, as a technical staff, did not fall, but the letters more and more resembled the pattern answers of robots, and the client’s waiting time on the phone grew steadily. At some point, the execution of applications began to resemble a conveyor for sending letters of the same type, and the entire department began to exist on the principle of work-time_to_son-work. It became obvious that the time has come for a change.
Disposition
Here we need to make a small remark about our favorite department and explain what principles are laid in the foundation of his work. I will also talk about what goals we set for ourselves, in addition to the obvious desire to solve technical difficulties encountered by clients as quickly and efficiently as possible.
On Habré, there were already several articles on technical support for Veeam ( link once , link two ), and those who are interested in learning more can refer to them, but briefly, we are very proud of our level of customer satisfaction (metric with ambiguously translatable name Customer satisfaction). According to estimates based on reviews that customers can leave after completing each case, we have this level confidently at the level of 98% - 99%, which is a very high figure for the industry. In practice, this means that, first of all, we work with a specific person, and not with an impersonal problem. We need an aftertaste that remains with the customer after contacting technical support. Such an attitude gives the client a sense of engineer involvement in his particular case and increases mutual comfort during a conversation, since Initially, all customers are somewhat annoyed.
Measuring the level of customer satisfaction from contacting an international support service is, quite frankly, not a trivial task. This is not the level of sales that can be measured with a ruler. It can not be measured by the number of positive reviews because, for example, the Spaniards, all as one, write reviews, and they are much more important what the engineer said, while the server rebooted than the quality of the information received. On the other hand, from the IT specialists of the CIS space reviews come only in case of customer dissatisfaction. To write positive reviews with us, apparently, is still not accepted. Therefore, we have to spin and invent a weighted evaluation method.
So, at that time we had a department numbering about 40 engineers, the average age did not exceed 25 years, absolutely everything is technically remarkably well-versed, fluent in several languages, intelligent, ambitious and, as it turned out later, they like to meet innovations like true sample introverts - with a huge suspicion
The department should be developed, and there is no way to allow personnel turnover due to the moral fatigue of engineers. That is why it is very important to monitor the involvement of engineers in the work, not allowing the working day to become a set of routine operations that can kill all the desire to return to the office the next day with amazing speed. Sometimes a week is enough to completely burn out a person.
Contrary to popular belief, it is impossible to artificially increase employee motivation. If he is tired of his field of work, then soon he will stop doing it, and, if not completely, but his productivity will drop to a minimum. It is useless to raise his salary, to promise arbitrarily tempting bonuses and buns. These are all temporary measures. Increasing the level of motivation of technical specialists through external vanity tools is a myth, it can only be dropped to the plinth, so forget about increasing motivation.
On the other hand, the management of the department needs a tool that allows them to quietly peek at the activity of their employees, draw conclusions and gently stifle problems that arise in the bud. Traditional metrics cannot provide this data, since they give insufficiently operational "average temperature in the hospital." It is possible to record all the actions of an engineer very meticulously, but how to compare the performance of a theoretical engineer who opens a lot of logs, issues a solution and writes a detailed letter with instructions for correcting it with the performance of a practical engineer who makes it easier to call and configure everything yourself than to write multi-volume letters - science is not known. But there are still appeals that promise half a day on the phone, or questions about finding the right paragraph in the documentation. In a word, the standard quantitative indicators, which are diligently imposed on sales departments, are not applicable for the case of support.
In the beginning was the idea
So, the problem was there, and we had to solve it. It was a great time when trial and error was the rule. Even the most insane ideas were successfully introduced into the production process, and generally accepted international practices turned out to be either not applicable at all, or simply did not work due to such reasons as mentality.
It was in this situation, during one of the meetings, that someone mentioned the topic of today's article. We tried to discuss the idea, but it turned out that besides the name and some fragmentary knowledge at the level of definition, no one knows anything from wikipedia. Everyone just heard something about the introduction of game mechanics, achivki, points and the fact that it is very healthy and good.
Well, they talked, okay, but, as always, there was one person whom the idea hooked and who subsequently developed the idea before his combat enthusiasm. For which he thanks a lot from all of us.
Start digging
Immediately there was a problem, indicated at the very beginning of the article - a terrible lack of information. Almost informational hunger. Everything that could somehow shed light on implementation practices was googled, but it soon became clear that, apart from general descriptive articles and elementary truths, nothing sensible could be found.
The only thing that was noteworthy was the recording of the speech of Aliya Rakimgulova (which can be easily found on the open spaces of the network), where she very well described a real example of implementation.
And when the first notes of the desire to quit everything started ringing, help came, from where they did not wait - a whole course on this topic was found at ousera, which started so well in the near future. To say that the knowledge gained there was invaluable, it is modestly silent. Free online learning has shown itself in all its glory. It was clear that the lecturer knew what he was talking about, so after completing the course in his head there was a set of well-structured knowledge, the right books were ordered on Amazon, and the introduction plan began to acquire the first signs of adequacy.
In total, the stage of theoretical training took about 3 months.
Means and Goals
So, the disposition is known, the possibilities are obvious, it is time to analyze the internal processes and separate the wheat from the chaff. It is critical at this stage not only to understand what the average engineer does, but also to clearly define what we really want from him as a result of the working day: i.e. what exactly should be paid more attention, where it is possible to be simpler, and where it is not happening at all as it was intended. Such an analysis is very useful in itself, since allows you to take a sober look at the entire existing system and notice the obvious problems that for some reason have not been solved once there a long time ago, but now they exist as a given, because there is nothing more permanent than temporary solutions.
In our case, for the engineer, as a consumer of a new service, the most important factor in the success of the future enterprise was chosen the idea of absolute transparency of all processes related to gamification, which should not distract him from work, and they (background gamification processes) should be completely autonomous . No new or unnecessary actions on the part of employees should be performed.
The second important was the condition for the engineer to get feedback on the effectiveness of his work in a convenient (read: easy to understand for a mere mortal) form and having the opportunity to compare his progress with other employees. Subsequently, this gives rise to the very element of the game and competition, due to which the engineer’s involvement in performing certain tasks increases. But it is unacceptable to miss an important point - it is often wrong to measure people with absolute indicators. Bare numbers (tasks taken out of context) are often useless and even harmful, so you need to calibrate all measurable metrics according to their business specifics. The meaning of the idea is that each engineer must solve his and only his own tasks (and the plan for them may be different, since the tasks of different engineers may have different complexity), and at the end of the month see that he has completed the plan for 100 calls %, and his neighbor by 90%, and the fact that his plan was set to accept 10 calls, and his neighbor - 110, he does not need to know, in general.
According to the results of his work, the engineer must receive certain assets — Achievements (Achievements) and Points (Points). Each action brings a certain number of points, and a set of actions formed on a certain basis (take 10 phone calls, for example) brings the achievement and the number of points associated with it. Obtaining a certain set of achievements brings more valuable complex achievements, which, in turn, brings even more points. Ultimately, points can be converted into specific tangible and / or intangible benefits for employees (“rewards”).
And in the end, we don’t forget about the moment with managing people: the managers and team leaders of the department receive a very interesting set of structured metrics, which by modifying can effectively control the behavior of employees, as well as analyze their performance over a given period of time. For example, if we see that the waiting time on the phone of customers, say, from France, is increasing, we increase the number of points for taking calls from this region, thereby increasing the engineer’s interest in such calls. This is an extremely simple, but very clear example.
Executive Search
After the goals became clear and clearly articulated, the most interesting part began: the choice of platform.
Historically, we work in CRM Salesforce, and since one of the fundamental principles was simplicity for an engineer, we immediately abandoned the introduction of new third-party applications. Our goal was to search for a plug-in module, fully embedded in Salesforce without popups, tray icons and other husks, which distract engineers from work.
Then an ordinary sheet of white paper appeared on the scene, but a very large sheet on which was drawn a sign with a list of companies that declare that they can provide the functionality required for us. In the first sample there were 12 applicants, among which there were 2 decisions from compatriots. But, unfortunately, they were soon mercilessly sifted out along with many others.
Domestic solutions were eliminated quickly due to the lack of experience with Salesforce, which did not gain much penetration in the CIS for several reasons. And, frankly, there was a feeling that these developers just wanted to get this new experience for them for our money, without guaranteeing a result. Or guaranteeing, but only if, in case of failure, we begin to use SharePoint, for which everything is already ready for them. “Cinema and Germans” in one word.
With the European and American suppliers, the situation was more rosy, but of them were crossed out because of the absolute reluctance to change anything in their product. And this is despite the fact that any decision on gamification cannot be boxed by definition. This is always a rebuild for the customer, with the introduction and debugging. And the culprit is to blame that gamification is solely for increasing sales. Having only heard that we need to introduce our own logic of building metrics, most of them said that they are not interested, they have cool graphics with the number of sales and this is the ultimate dream for each client, and the crazy Russians again come up with something.
Then it turned out that a number of solutions represent us an unnecessary corporate social network, where employees of the company (for points and achivki) will have to communicate (in addition to Facebook and VKontakte), upload photos, send working requests to each other and discuss news. As I said above, our goal was to make gamification transparent, unobtrusive, non-distracting from work and organically integrated into the existing business process. Therefore, the idea of introducing a new “social network” was no good for us.
Several solutions were completely puzzled by the lack of any kind of process automation. In order to issue an achivka, the manager must log in and enter her data manually. To build and distribute a report - go to the system, specify the parameters and click the “generate” button, wait for the process to finish and send to the distribution address. And all hands! And such systems, it should be said, cost a lot of money, and, apparently, they are bought because they are present in the market.“The 21st century is in the courtyard!”, One cannot say otherwise.
As a result of this improvised tender, only one software company from distant America remained, which really surprised us with the desire to undertake such a non-trivial task that we needed and, as it turned out later, the idea of moving away from the classical canons of the genre so captured their entire company not a startup), that in some cases the CEO of the company did not hesitate to “correct” the system code on “live TV”, during test launches and demonstrations. In other words, they perfectly understood our ideas and agreed that the practices of one department (Sales) cannot be directly transferred to another (Support). This laid the foundation for our successful cooperation with the company IActionable.
And the battle struck
The first head-on lump in the technical implementation stage was waiting for us in a rather unexpected place - all gaming systems do not have a free testing period. No, from the word "absolutely." They explained to us that this is such a niche feature, and no one wants to give it up. If you want to know if gamification will be useful to you, pay for the trial period and pay a lot. Nobody will agree to finance such experiments with an unknown result for big money, but the water wears away the stone, so after the negotiations we managed to achieve a result that suits both parties.
Then work began directly on introducing the gamification module into the existing business system. I think that most habrizhiteli never faced Salesforce, so I will make a small remark about this CRM. In fact, this is just a huge database that provides flexible tools for creating your own interface to access it. Thus, setting up Salesforce is not just “turning on a set of checkmarks” —it is a complete development, which, if you will, is similar to setting up a well-known accounting product for a particular company. Therefore, one cannot simply bring some code and connect it as a module to an existing system. The developers of the module, first of all, should rather tightly communicate with the developers who have customized the customer's system, and only then begin the implementation.
In our case, the whole process took almost five months, three of which were spent on testing and revision. After the completion of closed tests, when all the metrics were processed in the necessary way, a knight's move was made - the system was connected to the combat production, but only with the interface completely turned off - i.e. in fact, the engineers had already begun to use it, but they did not know it. This was the stage of the final tests, debugging and accumulation of the statistics of “the usual work of engineers” to correctly calibrate the cost of the tools.
Audience reaction
Omitting the details of the presentation of the system to the engineers, because everything is pretty obvious here, I want to talk about the involvement of engineers in the development of the system itself. At the time of the combat launch, the filling with gamification content left much to be desired, and the guys themselves asked for “access to the body” to help fill the system with achivts, and it was decided to let them turn around. As a result, in the titles and descriptions of achivok you can find references to almost any field of interest of our employees - from games and movies, to anime and books.
Here are examples of the names of the achivements, issued for solving a certain number of cases from a particular country: Memento Mori, Big in Japan, I Fink U Freeky!, Ɐıʃɐɹʇsn∀ sǝsɐƆ 51 soʃƆ (my favorite), etc. I think it is not necessary to explain which stereotypes from which countries were taken. Were not forgotten and industry jokes, such as the canonical: I Am Putting My Screwdriver Everywhere.
Several rare and epic “heightened value achievements” have been created, which are given out not only for special successes in work, but also for simply physically difficult actions. How do you, for example, “close 10 calls from Malta”? I can say with full confidence that customers from Malta are now the most beloved and expected.
Icons were not forgotten. Every single one is drawn by the engineers of the department, and the process of their refinement continues constantly.
In general, the implementation went quite smoothly and in the expected scenario. A pre-selected group of the most active (read “playing games”) employees successfully created the necessary “noise background” and helped those who had such a new system become familiar with. A small proportion of people reacted with predictable suspicion, but soon they were also assimilated by the system with varying degrees of success.
We believe that another important goal has been achieved - no one remained indifferent.
Summarizing
Now, when 4 months have passed since the start of implementation, we are ready to draw some conclusions.
• Gamification is not a myth, but an excellent tool for managing business processes;
• It is impossible to carry out the introduction, without having clear goals. It is necessary to soberly assess existing problems, and whether they can be solved with the help of this tool;
• Having created a healthy competition among your employees (due to the appearance of a publicly available “leaderboard”), be prepared to be surprised at the increased productivity;
• Absolutely not applicable templates. Your specific gaming system will only work with your specific people. If from other departments they come to you with a desire to copy a ready-made solution, then be prepared to cool them down;
• Attempt to implant a game with a hot iron forcibly. Start with the most active, they will infect the rest;
• It is impossible to replace the game with real people management. There should always be a clear boundary beyond which the game ends and a dry business language begins. People need to work not for the game, but for business.
We plan to publish more detailed results in 3 months, when the initial boom finally subsides and the system enters combat mode. Then we can talk about the correctness of statistics and compare it before and after.
But if someone is interested in more detailed details regarding this or that aspect, then welcome to the comments.
Well, if there is a desire to join our friendly team - welcome to ourcareer site !
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/244557/
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