Anyone who runs a digital business recognizes the need for interesting and interactive content to attract and retain customers, train employees, and gig workers, and engage value chain stakeholders. This is precisely where QuoDeck comes in. A B2B SaaS Digital Learning and Engagement Platform, QuoDeck enables organizations to use interactivity and games to engage audiences. Founders Kamalika Bhattacharya and Arijit Lahiri experienced a moment of insight on a routine visit to a mall. “We found that in between scanning visitors, the security guard was playing candy crush,” exclaims Bhattacharya. “That’s when we realized that people are more motivated by entertainment than traditional learning constructs,”

QuoDeck began as a game-based learning system but now offers a complete digital engagement suite, called the QuoDeck Interactive Cloud that promises engagement, speed, mobility, regionalization, data, and security. QuoDeck has been awarded a fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering, London and Newton Fund and selected as a winner at ET Power of Ideas.

Today, QuoDeck caters to over 5 million users across an enterprise client list that includes Unilever, Vodafone, Flipkart, Dabur, etc.

Role of gamification in the workplace

Gaming is all about stimulating people, driving a healthy sense of competition among them, and ultimately rewarding them. Rooted in psychology, it can be used to drive any kind of activity or function in the workplace. It works particularly well in the field of learning and enablement by adding an element of fun to propel interest and engagement. This is often achieved by using points, badges, rewards, and contests to create a sense of competition and winning around learning and knowledge consumption.

Studies have shown that through gamified learning and training, retention of information is longer and has high recall value due to the fact it is generally imparted through an audio-video medium. Gamification is also an excellent tool to test participants. It can be used to assess how the participants manage time, prioritize and respond to social cues, among other key skills.

Nowadays, many organisations are shifting towards gamification, making the corporate process smooth and easy going for both HRs and employees.

Gamification is used at workplaces to add a fun element and to increase the level of interest of employees in their day-to-day tasks. It is used in many corporate practices such as onboarding new employees, training, employee engagement & motivation.

What is the scope for job creation through Gamification?

Educational, training, and recruitment platforms are increasingly leveraging the fun elements of gaming to help engage people in jobs. It follows then, that the reverse can also be true – gamification can be used to impart basic skills to people before they are hired and also upskilling them after they are hired. This should impel better outcomes for people looking for work opportunities, effectively making them more job-ready.

Also, an increasing proportion of the workforce that companies are going to hire in the near future will be gig workers. According to a 2021 report by Boston Consulting Group, gig workers have the potential to service up to 90 million jobs in India, or 10 percent of India’s roughly 900 million-strong workforce in the near future. Companies across sectors are banking on the rise of the gig economy to scale fast but quickly hiring gig workers and training them is a huge challenge for enterprises. Gamification can solve for this challenge and maximise job creation. Entertainment and gaming platforms are hugely popular among gig workers to alleviate boredom. A platform that leverages this entertainment factor with high-quality UI can help companies hire and train staff in a highly scalable manner.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

QuoDeck tracks event stream data continuously and uses Machine Learning methods to figure out trends that prove effective for people. The data is aggregated, co-related, and filtered in real time to help create personalized recommendation algorithms that evolve based on what users prefer to consume. As for Artificial Intelligence, that finds applications in learning content creation such as question generators and chat bots that are used to mimic real-life situations as closely as possible.

Where does India stand versus global trends in the adoption of Gamification?

If you look at the numbers, the global gamification market is expected to grow exponentially to USD 38.3 billion by 2027, from a mere USD 9.1 billion in 2020. Things are a little slower in India. While the adoption of gaming is widespread, the use of gamification mechanics in businesses is still at a nascent stage. Moreover, gamification seems to be geared more towards the internal customer than the external. Most Indian apps have yet to gamify their customer, partner or vendor onboarding process as well as their loyalty programs even though these are known to have a tremendous impact.

Working with fortune 500 companies

As India’s largest digital learning and engagement platform, QuoDeck works with several Fortune 500 companies such as Unilever, Vodafone, Flipkart, Tata Consumer, Dabur, and Britannia. These companies have been quick off the mark in recognising the potential and benefits of gamification for their external and internal audiences. Gamification is particularly effective for training and upskilling full-time employees as well as gig workers. Moreover, given the large audiences these companies need to address, digital platforms are the only scalable option for them as they allow standardization and big data collection.

What would it take for smaller companies to adopt Gamification?

Smaller companies need bite-sized platforms and a content-ready approach to spur them to adopt gamification in their businesses. Reducing the cost outlay and providing customized platforms that can go live in a matter of days will certainly make gamification more widely acceptable.

How far away are we from a future where every company prioritises this?

Most companies already realize the need for scalable platforms to train their workers. A field-based workforce requires an approach to training that is different from the traditional classroom, workshop, or on-the-job model. Gamification makes the process of learning entertaining, pull-based and relatable, thereby allowing for maximum adretention. Businesses can no longer afford to ignore the importance of gaming and gamification as effective tools for audience engagement and training; embracing them fully is not too far away in the future.

What are QuoDeck’s plans and goals?

Modern-day businesses across the world are dealing with the challenge of reaching their geographically widespread workforce. This challenge is a huge opportunity for us. We plan to go global with our entire suite of services and work with companies in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. While we pursue this goal, we need to ensure that QuoDeck remains the market leader in its category as it is today. We hope to keep it so with constant cutting-edge innovation.

This was first published on BW Gaming World