How to Set Up Gamification in Salesforce Experience Cloud to Boost Engagement

When someone says “gamification”, some hear “games”, “fun”, and “entertainment”. True that! However, it takes new shades when we apply the notion to Salesforce. Here, it’s not solely about “fun” per se; it’s about augmenting user engagement, productivity, and experience. 

Keep reading as we delve into the intricacies of setting gamification up in Salesforce Experience Cloud and explain how you can win this game-changing experience for your organization (pun intended).

Gamification, Fully Explained

Gamification uses gameplay and its mechanics to nudge and motivate users while engaging with your website, application, or service through creative and engaging content. The whole gist of gamification is getting certain points and rewards for completing an action. For example:

• Commenting on a post in a community.
• Finishing a lesson, training module, etc.
• Sharing a best practice with other participants in a community.
• Competing against peers in competitions. 

A perfect example of gamification in Salesforce is Trailhead. Users take miscellaneous trails and modules and receive certain badges (points) for finishing them. This is how the sense of achievement forms. Thus, I’m a proud Mountaineer on Trailhead, with 31 badges, 26,075 points, and 8 trails taken. Consequently, I have to garner 19 more badges to hit the Expeditioner rank. Well, someone has to put her nose to the grindstone! 

Using Gamification in Salesforce Experience Cloud: Common Benefits

If done correctly, gamification can significantly level up user engagement and experience. But that’s only the tip of it. Have a look-see at some common advantages you get when implementing gamification in Salesforce Experience Cloud:

• Improved User Retention: Gamification keeps users coming back for more and engaging in content more actively. I can also judge by my own experience. I would return to an online community again and again if it provided some offbeat, entertaining components. 
• Higher Satisfaction: Who likes boring customer journeys, accompanied by mundane walls of text? No one! That’s what a gamified experience is for – a user “plays” with what you have to offer, their satisfaction levels increase, and everyone is happy.
• Better Collaboration: Ideal for communities, gamification can nurture a sense of belonging, encouraging users to share their knowledge, participate in the community’s online live, and compete with each other. 
• Higher Revenue: Implementing gamification is a win-win for sales departments to reach higher sales targets, accelerate deal closure, and attract new customers. You have to just pack it up in a lucrative way and present it to your audience.

Main Gamification Functionality in Salesforce

Gamification in Salesforce Experience Cloud is many-sided. There are main pillars: Recognition Badges, Missions, and Reputation Leaderboards (Levels). Before we start doing real work setting gamification up for a Salesforce Experience Cloud site, navigate through these key elements to understand their meaning: 

1. Recognition Badges 

Recognition Badges in Salesforce Experience Cloud represent virtual awards that users can earn for achieving specific goals and milestones. They act as positive reinforcement and are one of the striking examples of gamification:

• Users can earn this badge for contributing to the community and helping others.
• Such badges are designed for those who complete specific tasks or reach certain milestones, such as joining the community or commenting on a post.
• Community members can enjoy these badges for demonstrating their expertise and sharing knowledge in a particular way. 
• Badges can be specifically assigned to those taking on leadership roles and mentoring others.

2. Missions

Being part of Recognition Badges, Missions are structured challenges or quests that users can take to earn rewards, points, and badges. While manually assigning badges to your community users would be time-consuming, Missions can be a great automation ally for gamification. 

The rule of thumb is that Missions have well-defined goals that users should strive for. They motivate people to excel in whatever it takes and drive better performance. Thus, each Mission in Salesforce Experience Cloud is based on an action, such as:

• Write a post
• Write a comment
• Receive a comment 
• Like something
• Ask a question
• Answer a question
• Mark an answer as best
• Receive an answer
• Your answer is marked
• Upload a profile picture

3. Reputation Leaderboards

Gamification is part of a competition. So as not to make participation in your community a one-horse race for users, you can infuse a pinch of competition into it with Reputation Levels and Reputation Leaderboards. 

They’re an extremely powerful tool for fostering competition, recognition, and engagement on your Experience Cloud site. The logic is in displaying the top-performing users based on their accumulated points, badges, and other metrics available in your community. Enabling reputation activates a default point system and a set of reputation levels on the Experience Cloud site. Community managers can customize labels and point values.

The Leaderboards’ advantages are pretty much similar to those that Reputation Badges and Missions have. However, such a magnificent tool serves as an additional kickstart for passive community users. That’s a win-win scenario!  

A user’s reputation levels appear on the user’s profile page in the Influence board (we’ll showcase it in a moment). It can be visible to other people so that they can see how influential you are and take notice. 

When a user joins a community, their reputation is at the lowest level. However, it grows exponentially as they become more active by commenting on posts, mentioning another user, asking/answering questions, and doing so much more. We’ll dive into setting up Reputation on an Experience Cloud site in a moment.

How to Set Gamification Up in Salesforce Experience Cloud: Your Step-by-Step Tutorial

Now that we’re done with the basics, I’d like to guide you through the process of implementing gamification into a Salesforce Experience Cloud site. Follow these simple steps to do just that. It isn’t rocket science at all! 

Step 1: Locating Gamification in the Experience Builder

Start with logging into your Salesforce organization. In the Home tab, type in Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box. We’re looking for All Sites.

Once you hit All Sites, here’s the list of all your Experience Cloud sites (aka digital experiences) you’ve ever created. Decide on the site you’d like to set up gamification on and find the Workspaces Action. Click it.

We’ve been transferred to the under-the-hood of an Experience Cloud site. Here, find the Gamification tab on the My Workspaces tile to enter it.

This is when it gets tricky. If your site doesn’t have gamification yet, you have to enable it first to play around with Recognition Badges, Missions, and Leaderboards as we’ve discussed above. Mine doesn’t, so let’s enable this powerful feature on my site, which takes us to Step 2.

Step 2: Turning the Thanks Settings On

We’re getting closer! You thought that you could set gamification in Salesforce Lightning, didn’t you? In fact, this is not the case; we need to switch to Salesforce Classic. Go to the Home screen in your organization, click View profile in the top right corner, and hit Switch to Salesforce Classic.

Once you’re transferred to the outdated layout, find Setup.

In the Setup, type in WDC in the Quick Find box on your left and choose WDC Settings.

Your next move is to enable Thanks Settings – they’re paramount for setting gamification up in Salesforce Experience Cloud as they activate the ability to create Recognition Badges and Missions.

After you do this sub-step, return to your Experience Builder Workspace → Gamification and reload the page. 

There we go! We’ve successfully activated gamification on an Experience Cloud site. This is when the creative work kicks in.

Step 3: Creating a Reputation Badge

As shown in the screenshot above, now we have Recognition Badges and Missions available for configuring gamification. Let’s proceed with creating a Recognition Badge. 

Note: You won’t be able to proceed with Mission without assigning a Badge to it first. 

Salesforce has pre-defined Badges for you to have a kickstart. It can be a Welcome, Congratulations, Nice Work, or Thanks Badge. You can either edit/delete already available Badges or design one from scratch. I’ll go with the second option by hitting the New button in the top right corner.

My Badge is called Top Performer and I’d like it to be issued to a user who is the most active and engaged in my community. You have options to make it public so that every member of the community can give this Badge to others (keep in mind that you can deselect it), set it as active, and make it Mission-related so that it’s automatically assigned to a Mission. Let’s Save. Now, we design our first fully possible Mission.

Step 4: Creating a Mission Badge

To boost engagement in my community, I created a new Mission – Comment – which will be accomplished each time a member writes a comment on the community. They’ll receive the Mission Badge we’ve designed in the previous step – the Top Performer Badge. If you want to develop something similar, click the New button and specify all the details for a Mission.

Step 5: Enabling Reputation on an Experience Cloud Site

Do you remember the Reputation Leaderboard we previously discussed? I’ll show you how to enable the reputation feature and reputation levels in an Experience Cloud site. 

Enter your Experience Workspaces and click Administration → Preferences. Under Experience Management, tick Enable setup and display of reputation levels and click Save at the bottom of the page.

Note: If your Experience Cloud site doesn’t have Chatter enabled, the Reputation section doesn’t appear. To show the Reputation section, go to Administration → Preferences, and select Show all settings in Workspaces.

Step 6: Adjusting Reputation Levels and Points

Now, let’s set up reputation levels and points. To motivate your site’s users to accumulate points for their activity, there are 10 default reputation levels. You can customize them so that they align with your brand’s and site’s identity. To enable and tailor them, go to Experience Workspaces → Administration → Reputation levels. Once you’re set, click Save.

With reputation points, the logic remains the same. Go to your Experience Workspaces → Administration → Reputation Points and specify the amount of points a user gets for participating in your site. If you don’t want a user to accrue points for a certain action, just set 0 (zero) in the points field.

Step 7: Assembling Gamification Components on the Site’s Layout

Once Recognition Badges and Missions are designed, go to Experience Builder. On the left dashboard, choose Components and find Gamification. There you’ll see Recognition Badges and Reputation Leaderboard.

First, drag and drop the Reputation Leaderboard component to the site’s layout and decide on its settings. You can have up to 10 community members displayed on the Leaderboard.

Second, we need to add Recognition Badges to our site. Just drag and drop the component to the layout. You can customize the button’s text which is shown in the community. I’ll go with Give. The feature will display users’ badges and allow them to award badges to others. By the way, you can’t assign a badge to yourself.

Here, I’m assigning a standard Welcome badge to Olivia. She deserves to be welcomed! 

Step 8: Enjoying Gamification On An Experience Cloud Site

It’s time to look at gamification from another perspective! This is with the community user’s eyes. While in the community, click on your profile avatar. The rule of thumb is that it’s in the top right corner. 

Here, there’s an Influencer board with the number of followers, posts, comments, and likes a user received. If set up by the site’s Admin, you’ll also notice the Feed and your activity. As you can see, the newly created Reputation Badge, my Reputation Level, and Points are displayed there. 

Last but not least, this is how a Reputation Leaderboard is featured. Remember that you can tweak this component as you see fit. As of now, I’m the winner at a newbie level!

Final Thoughts

Implementing gamification in Salesforce Experience Cloud is a cakewalk. Even though it takes quite a lot of steps to set everything up, the game is worth the candle.

Here are a couple of friendly pointers before you dip your toe into gamification in Salesforce Experience Cloud:

1. Don’t forget that Salesforce Classic is still a thing and you might require some settings made in that interface. 
2. Be as creative as you can – it’s your call to decide how to engage your site’s users or which gamification techniques to use.
3. You can always seek some advice from Advanced Communities, a certified Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation partner.  

Q&A

1. How can we encourage members to be more vocal on the platform and interact with one another more frequently?

Gamification is just the ticket. The concept uses gameplay mechanics to ignite site members’ interest and foster engagement. In Salesforce, you can implement gamification through Reputation Badges, Missions, and Reputation Levels. The more active a member is, the more points they accrue and the more influential they become.

2. What are the best resources to learn about gamification on Experience Cloud?

You can discover all the details about gamification in Salesforce Trailhead communities or by browsing through the official Salesforce help center.

3. Can a Salesforce badge have multiple missions to it?

No, you can only create one badge for one Mission.