Gamification and Microsoft Dynamics CRM: For the Yankees, fun and user adoption go together

Believe or not, for most companies implementing - and deploying - Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the easy part. The hard part is getting users to, well, use it.

But recently, more organizations are to trying to increase user adoption by turning to "gamification" - building in game-like mechanisms to make business systems more fun.

"Gamification provides a strategy for measuring, rewarding, and encouraging user engagement," Gretchen Opferkew, Director of Education, PowerObjects, wrote in a recent article. "With gamification, users of the business application accumulate points, badges, levels, or other rewards for taking certain actions in the system."

One organization already successfully applying gamification to Dynamics CRM is the New York Yankees.

"We installed Microsoft Dynamics CRM a couple years ago, the 2011 version," said Scott Jeffer, Manager CRM and Database Strategist, New York Yankees, who was speaking at an online meeting of  CRMUG (he also presented on this topic at Convergence 2013). "At every Microsoft conference, this statistic is always thrown out - 42% of the time a CRM project fails, it's because of the user adoption. And I heard at this past Convergence that number is [even higher]."  Jeffer is a long time proponent of CRM in sports businesses, including in his previous role with the minor league Toledo Mudhens.

Jeffer has been experimenting with gamification principals for several years now, setting up different programs for different business goals.  The bottom line in any successful approach: make it fun.

One of the successful gamification programs the Yankees have put into place is called CRM Heroes.