Bunchball expands into apps to gamify any company

Gamification pioneer debuts 10 apps, a tool to gamify any enterprise software

No matter what industry your company is in, there are some gamification elements that could increase work productivity or user engagement and one pioneer in the gamification field, Bunchball, announced today that it is expanding its offerings with two entirely new products -- one of which is comprised of 10 new apps. 

The group of ten apps, the Spark Series, tunes into exactly what your company focus is and where you want employees or users to gear up. 

 The entire Spark suite is made up of:

1.       Spark Engagement: motivates users to consume, create and share on content sites

2.       Spark Loyalty: creates a results-oriented online loyalty program

3.       Spark Partner: rewards channel partners for learning about and selling products

4.       Spark Commerce: drives purchase and social sharing

5.       Spark Community: motivates collaboration, discussion and knowledge sharing

6.       Spark Sales: motivates sales performance and CRM adoption

7.       Spark Training: motivates users to learn new skills and complete training courses

8.       Spark Service: motivates your team to deliver superior service

9.       Spark Adoption: drives product mastery & application usage

10.   Spark Conversion: drives product mastery & trial conversion

When I caught up with founder and Chief Product Officer Rajat Paharia last week, he explained that when the company started out, they believed that the Nitro gamification platform they built would be the best way to help a range of companies insert gamification elements into their process, but over the years it became clear that apps would be a vital part of the process as well.

“Our customers kept mentioning the same business problems they wanted us to solve,” said Paharia. “So we got to work honing our solutions into apps that companies to choose from based on their individual needs and models."

The apps are individually priced with various annual fees ranging from a few hundred dollars to more than $15,000.  

Bunchball, founded in 2007, has roughly 60 employees and customers include Warner Bros., Comcast, USA Network, Adobe, VMWare, Bravo, and Hasbro. 

Bunchball has raised $17.5 million to date in a space that includes Big Door, Badgeville, Gigya, and Crowdtwist. 

Bunchball has been hard at work building these apps to mold to different verticals  and has been working with a handful of companies in testing mode to see how they work in a live environment.  Some of the companies that got to test drive these new solutions include J. Hilburn (a men's clothing provider) and Bluewolf (a consulting firm specializing in SaaS applications).

 "Our challenge at Bluewolf is to increase enterprise knowledge-sharing both internally and externally. In encouraging this culture shift, we see gamification as an important part of the change management strategy," said Corinne Sklar, vice president of marketing at Bluewolf, in a statement. "We are seeing a growing trend for integrating game mechanics into more traditional enterprise based services such as CRM and collaboration suites. The gamification of the enterprise and workplace provides the motivation to share data, improve customer insight and collaborate. We’ve seen the success internally and, with partners like Bunchball, we anticipate similar success with clients.” 

With this fleet of apps, Bunchball is also a tool called Fuse, which lets a corporation connect and gamify any enterprise software. You could, for instance, choose to gamify something in Microsoft’s SharePoint software, Oracle PeopleSoft, SAP, Sharepoint, SugarCRM, Taleo, or Workday monitor the activity or usage, and then share the output with the Nitro gamification platform.  

“We have definitely been pioneers in this field and we see our Spark Solutions as a way that we can package our knowledge and turn it into effective, turnkey applications for site owners who need to address a business issue with a quick and easy way solution that shows immediate value,” Paharia explained.