Travel buyers can improve compliance by using games which enhance employees’ status and reputation within their companies.
A session on gamification at the Business Travel Show heard that the way to encourage travellers to stay within policy was to find ways to motivate them with rewards for good behaviour.
Scott Schnaars, EMEA general manager for gamification specialist Badgeville, said that rewarding people for changing behaviour went back more than 2,000 years to Roman times when the authorities encouraged people to fight in battles with the promise of being given special arrows as a reward.
“Some people think gamification is a big fad that will be dying off in a couple of years, but it has been going on in different forms for a long time,” he said.
“We now know even more about human psychology and how people behave. This can be combined with the mobile technology that everybody now has with to create gamification.”
Schnaars said that most employees wanted to “build advancement” within their companies and this could be harnessed within gamification processes.
“Reputation within the organisation is people’s number one priority rather than money,” he added. “They will want to know: what am I getting out of this?”
American Express Global Business Travel’s Charlotte Blackwell said that the TMC had been piloting its gamification platform Go Time with client Citrix.
“We have already been seeing some positive results even during the first 30 days of the trial,” she said. “We have particularly seen an impact on the use of advance purchases and preferred suppliers – we can see that there has been a shift of behaviour in the first 30 days.
“Gamification is an opportunity to engage and interact. It’s a way of using incentives rather than traditional rules and regulations – introduce the carrot and not the stick, although you still need both as it’s not an either-or situation.”