It’s the all-around CRM tool that everyone knows and loves. It’s perfect for managing marketing campaigns, tracking sales, organizing customer queries, and much, much more.
While HubSpot and other CRMs are essential tools for all teams, they’re not really software that motivates people. This is where gamification platforms step in—providing that extra boost of encouragement to employees and teams so they can perform their best and, in turn, maximize your revenue. While HubSpot doesn’t offer any native gamification capabilities, it seamlessly integrates with other SaaS solutions—such as Plecto—that do.
In this article, we’ll go over how gamification improves the bottom line of your business performance—and how you can use Plecto’s motivating gamification features alongside the CRM capabilities found in HubSpot.
What is gamification and how can it improve business performance?
First things first—just what is gamification, and why is it important?
Gamification is the application of game-based elements to non-game activities. In other words, it’s the process of turning typically non-game activities into games (or at least into activities that have a game-based twist).
Frequent flier miles, credit card rewards points, social media profile completion bars, and leaderboards are all examples of game-like activities that have become so ubiquitous that you might not even recognize them as games.
Yet this is just proof of gamification’s success: it’s subtle, it’s prevalent, and it works.
Gamification has the ability to both drive employee and customer engagement (though we’ll mostly focus here on the employee end of things). It has three main functions:
To recognize achievement.
A common method of achievement recognition offices use is to display employee accomplishments on TV dashboards across the office, broadcasting colleague success to the entire team.
To maximize motivation.
Recognizing achievement leads to increased motivation. “If my colleague can do this, so can I!” If there’s a contest being run, seeing those in first, second, and third places can inspire those in the middle and back to pick up the slack in a fun (and nonthreatening) way.
To boost performance.
Finally, an increase in performance will flow naturally from the above two functions. Seeing colleagues’ wins in real time will spur on the motivation to outcompete, and in doing so create an environment where achieving goals previously thought unattainable becomes second nature.
Gamification as a business solution
In addition to these functions, gamification has been shown to be an effective solution for commonly occurring problems organizations and teams face. Don’t believe us? There are several studies that show just how powerful gamification is as a motivational tool and as an all-around solution to address these recurring issues. Below are just a few examples of problems that gamification can help remedy.
(Here we’ll provide the example of sales teams, as these are particularly applicable to Plecto use, but you can absolutely apply gamification solutions to situations faced by other teams too.)
Employee engagement
One of the biggest problems sales managers face is employee engagement. Sales center work has a reputation for being repetitive, dull, and stressful, which is reflected by the high turnover rate in telemarketing and call centers.
Gamification techniques such as contests, notifications, points, and badges can be effective for addressing employee fatigue, motivation, and disengagement. Statistics show that gamifying call center processes lead to happier, more motivated, and more productive employees, particularly by fostering a sense of social connectivity.
Teamwork, collaboration, and social connectivity
Let’s face it: call centers aren’t always the most socially stimulating or collaborative environments. Gamification offers an exciting opportunity to bring people in your call center together for a fun, common cause in a natural way. What better way to spur on team camaraderie than by running a contest where your team is given the opportunity to win a reward—or set a punishment for their team manager—if they achieve the set goal?
Ultimately, gamification relies on both individual initiative and group cooperation to succeed. By placing your team in situations that require collaboration, you naturally nurture your team to build social participation with their colleagues, engagement with their work, motivation to perform well, and their performance overall.
Performance-boosting psychology
Why does gamification work so well for motivation and performance? The reason lies in the key motivators of human psychology–competitiveness, sense of achievement, and love of prestige.
Gamifying call center activities—everything from the sales funnel to daily “to-do” lists—can turn even the most mundane tasks into exciting chances for employees to show off their prowess, whether in achieving everyday wins or reaching important milestones. This helps your agents develop a sense of individual purpose and your team a feeling of camaraderie, all while having a lot of fun.
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Gamifying HubSpot
While HubSpot doesn't have any inbuilt gamification features, Plecto enables HubSpot users to integrate their CRM data and gamify it. Even better, it's possible for HubSpot users to embed and view some of Plecto’s gamification features, like contests, in HubSpot. Whatever your gamification needs, whether in Sales, Marketing, or Support Hubs, you can integrate Plecto with HubSpot to deliver them effectively.
Just be aware that you can only create or modify these gamification features in Plecto—HubSpot simply serves to display these features. However, keeping these features in HubSpot allows for all-in-one access for platform users, with all CRM and gamification capabilities accessible at the press of a button.
Notifications
If you’re looking for a simple yet effective way to recognize your employees for reaching key milestones or even small everyday wins, notifications are the way to go. These alerts are best used to notify you and your team when an agent or team reaches a milestone, set for your choice of KPI. There are several ways to showcase notifications in Plecto—playing funny, personalized YouTube videos or GIFs on the office TV screens; sending messages to Slack and Microsoft Teams; changing lights or sounds connected via Philips Hue or Sonos; and having achievements appear in your News Feed.
Even better, notifications will appear on all devices connected to your Plecto account, so everyone on your team with the app can stay updated with the latest wins—anytime, anywhere.
Badges and Achievements
Just like notifications, badges (or achievements as they're called in Plecto) can be used as powerful psychological boosts for employees, as they keep teammates in the loop and allow their wins to be celebrated across the office.
Badges can be used for “Employee of the Month” awards, most deals closed per week recognition, and “Most Improved” awards, among other ideas. The sky’s the limit to what you can choose to recognize employees for. If you’re in a call center and want to focus your team’s time on closing valuable sales, you can efficiently assign badges with ease in Plecto. Here, a star icon, dollar sign, trophy, or whichever customized icon you choose will appear next to an employee’s name on your dashboards.
There’s an additional benefit to using specifically digital badges. While you could always give star employees traditional physical badges, doing so might have an unpleasant side effect: your employees could be embarrassed by having to wear a badge around, and could instead interpret the gesture as condescending. Remember to consider your team’s motivations and how they like to be celebrated, so as not to turn praise into something cynical.
Contests
Whether it’s a short call-a-thon or a seller of the month, it’s likely you have at least attempted to run some kind of contest in your organization before. And there’s a reason why: they are a fantastic way to build group rapport and spur on the best performance from your team, particularly for projects that require a high level of motivation and work ethic from everyone involved.
The advantages of competitions are that they are relatively simple to run and the parameters can be tailored to your needs. That is, contests can be individual- or team-based, short or long-term, and cover any KPI you can think of relevant to your situation.
Aside from creating a fun environment for your team, contests offer an opportunity to engage your team in friendly competition against each other, or to work together to achieve a common goal. From whichever perspective you see it, contests drive results. Use dashboards and leaderboards in your Plecto x HubSpot integration to display contest data, such as individual streaks, and encourage teammates to stay motivated and competitive!
Leaderboards
Displaying your agent’s names and profiles in a top-down or “podium” format based on their progress toward a goal is often seen in terms of visualizing team performance, but it can be considered a type of gamification too.
Who’s currently in first, second, third place? How far am I from reaching the top spot, and can I make it in time? These are some of the thoughts—and they’re powerful motivations indeed—likely running through your agents’ heads as they see their progress toward hitting a KPI or other goal on your office screens.
The Reward Store
This is one of the most exciting ways to keep employees motivated, as their performance will be spurred by the promise of a real-life reward! Use Plecto’s Reward Store to display different awards—movie tickets, a yearlong museum pass, a bottle of wine—each worth a different number of coins. Employees receive coins for completing a given task or reaching a certain goal, and can redeem these coins for rewards in the Store. With the promise of these intriguing rewards in play, you’ll be able to stimulate employee engagement like nothing else.
How to import your gamified dashboards into HubSpot
There’s one last thing you’re probably wondering—how to upload your gamified Plecto dashboards onto HubSpot.
The good news is that this process is really easy. Follow the simple steps below, and you’ll have complete CRM access to your Plecto-based gamification strategies in no time.
First, create a slideshow in your Plecto account.
On your home page, locate the Slideshow tab on the left-hand menu (under Visualization). This will open the Slideshow page. Once there, click New Slideshow, located in the upper-right corner. Give your new slideshow a name and click on Add dashboard slide to import your dashboards.
You can add as many dashboards as you like—each will appear on a different slide—and adjust the display times for each slide. Be sure to select a team to filter data by. Click Save in the bottom right once done.
Second, create a public URL for your slideshow.
The Create public URL tab is located in the bottom right of the page, and will automatically generate a URL for you. Copy this link.
Third, create a slideshow in HubSpot.
On the left-hand menu, locate the Reporting tab and open Dashboards. Click Actions in the upper-right corner and select Add external content. This will open a new window with several platforms to import data from. Select Other content, and paste your URL from Plecto in the URL or embed code box. Click Add once done.
And that’s it! Congratulations—you now have complete CRM access to Plecto’s exciting gamification capabilities. Just remember that you can only modify your Plecto data within Plecto.
Conclusion
Integrating your HubSpot account with Plecto thus creates a powerful, unified tool that not only ensures a seamless workflow, but also allows a positive culture of encouragement and sustained success to take root across your office.
Ready to take the HubSpot x Plecto plunge? Sign up here for a free 14-day Plecto trial. Bring the magic of gamification to your CRM system—and watch your team productivity and morale grow!
