REDWOOD CITY, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/16/13 --

Core News Facts:

• Bunchball, the pioneer and market leader in gamification, today announced it is extending the power of motivational techniques to the Salesforce Service Cloud, a leading customer service solution used by more than 32,000 organizations worldwide.
• Bunchball is bringing gamification to service, support and help desk environments via a new release of Nitro for Salesforce, a purpose-built application of Bunchball's acclaimed Nitro platform. While earlier releases of Nitro for Salesforce focused on gamifying Sales Cloud, the new release extends Bunchball's acclaimed game mechanics to both sales and service organizations. As a result, Nitro for Salesforce is the only fully integrated gamification solution available to drive sales and service desk performance right from within Salesforce.
• Nitro for Salesforce uses motivational techniques -- like goal-setting, real-time feedback, competition, virtual rewards, and leveling up -- to engage and motivate service agents to know more, collaborate more, work faster and work smarter.
  • Using Nitro for Salesforce, organizations can focus service teams on priorities and goals with targeted missions and challenges. For instance, using real-time feedback that rewards incremental improvement, managers can incent agents to reach key productivity milestones (such as completing 30 calls in an hour or reducing average call times by 10 percent), recognize them for improving service quality (such as achieving high marks in post-incident surveys), or acknowledge them for increasing their knowledge (by completing training courses).
  • And because Nitro for Salesforce also integrates with Salesforce Chatter (and by extension Chatter Communities for Service) service managers can create missions and rewards that motivate agents to respond quickly to complaints or queries that flow from social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
• With a single click on the Service Cloud console, agents can view their current point tallies, learn how many more points they need to reach the next level, and view the rewards they're working to earn. All game mechanics and status displays minimize automatically so time-pressed agents can stay focused on the tasks at hand.
  • Bunchball's latest solution also helps transform service tasks from an often solitary pursuit into a competitive team-based experience. Via custom leaderboards, managers can provide meaningful rankings including how each agent stacks up against colleagues by way of points, completed challenges and levels. Or they can incorporate metrics specific to Service Cloud, such as incidents closed, comments made to case records, or first-call resolution. With Nitro for Salesforce, managers can also publicly display leaderboards on dedicated monitors or TVs so team members can see where they stand compared to their colleagues.
• Nitro for Salesforce is part of Bunchball's growing line of Integrated Nitro Solutions that enables companies to apply game mechanics to common online interfaces right out of the box. It comes with everything organizations need to motivate communities: pre-built user interfaces, pre-configured point economies, a complete set of missions and an optimized administration console.
• The latest version of Nitro for Salesforce is available today via Salesforce.com's AppExchange Social Enterprise Showcase or directly from Bunchball.

Quotes:

Attributable to Joe Fisher, Vice President, Products, Bunchball
"Service, support and call center work can be highly repetitive and monotonous, which can lead to problems in productivity, absenteeism and turnover -- problems that directly impact the quality of service a company delivers to its customers. By adding the motivational power of gamification to Service Cloud, the latest release of Bunchball's Nitro for Salesforce offers an easy and effective way for service organizations to engage and focus agents who daily face high volumes of calls and ever-increasing productivity goals. With Nitro for Salesforce, Service Cloud customers can drive desirable behaviors that help cut costs, keep agents engaged and improve customer service."

ABOUT BUNCHBALL:
Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Powering the Engaged Enterprise, Bunchball enables organizations to improve business performance throughout their ecosystem by creating highly active and loyal customers, employees, and partners. Bunchball's comprehensive suite of innovative cloud-based solutions empowers companies to engage and motivate, leading to improved employee productivity, customer loyalty and ROI. Bunchball's world-class customers include Adobe, HP, Cisco, Warner Bros., Comcast, LiveOps, VMware and Hasbro. Based in Silicon Valley, Bunchball's investors include Granite Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Northport Investments, and Correlation Ventures. For more information, visit www.bunchball.com, our blog at www.gamification.com, or follow @bunchball.