A household name in UK retail transformed its performance metrics and boosted productivity, profit, and employee engagement with a gamified application developed by HI. Here’s how.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential for growth, but depending on the size of your company, you could be dealing with thousands of data points every day. How then do you turn this raw information into clear, actionable objectives for your employees?
The UK’s largest retailer found the answer in gamification.
This retailer, the end customer of one of our main clients, needed to process a vast amount of KPI data. Not only that, but this data needed to be useful for its employees and motivate them to improve.
That’s why the team at HI built a unique solution.
We designed and produced a highly scalable, distributed, microservices-based system that compiles, aggregates, and gamifies KPI data in just minutes. The product has since been deployed across all of the retailer’s stores, and is processing thousands of live KPI data points every minute.
What was once an overwhelming torrent of information is now a streamlined, actionable system that motivates the retailer’s employees to keep pace with evolving KPIs and has given them an impressive return on investment (ROI)—this is how.
What is gamification?
Gamification applies game design elements to data (KPIs, in this case), training materials, and applications to boost engagement, motivation, and productivity. These elements can include:
- Points and scoring systems
- Leaderboards
- Badges and achievements
- Missions/challenges
- Progress bars
- Gentle participation nudges and reminders
- Rewards and incentives
- Feedback and recognition
What are the main benefits of gamification?
Gamification essentially transforms dry and complex information into something interactive and engaging for users. It gives employees clear targets and full visibility into their performance, alongside regular acknowledgments of their success and incentives such as rewards and prizes.
This all helps to drive behavioural change. With gamification, employees are motivated to complete tasks in greater speeds and quantities, and sometimes together in teams, helping to cultivate a more lively workplace where employees are better aligned with your company objectives. And at the end of the day, a great work culture translates into a great bottom line.
What our client needed
Our client, a fleet management tech company, wanted to develop a large greenfield product for their customer—a retail giant in the UK. The goal was to turn KPI data into gamified objectives for the retailer’s employees. However, our client didn’t have the capacity to tackle a project of this scope, and so turned to HI for help.
After reviewing the project, we realised the retailer needed a product that was powerful, flexible, and—most importantly—scalable. Scalability is crucial when dealing with KPI data, as it allows the application to process large volumes of data efficiently and scale down when demand is lower, saving resources.
Building a gamified product
We wanted to create a product that tied into a broader cloud-native strategy we had introduced to our client, which is why we developed the gamified system entirely on Kubernetes—a system famous for its scalability, flexibility, and security.
The product’s main features
Autoscaling and load balancing
By hosting services in Kubernetes clusters, the system can scale up during peak data processing times and scale down when demand is lower. This means the system handles resources efficiently and reduces unnecessary load on the system.
Secure API gateway
We set up an autoscaling API gateway, secured with Oauth2 authentication, to filter requests and protect the backend from malicious traffic. This boosts security and keeps the system running at top performance.
Flexible microservices
The back-end of the product is made up of a series of microservices, each designed to handle tasks such as processing, aggregating, and caching KPI data. This allows the system to be tailored to various KPI data types and business needs.
Automated code
The codebase includes comprehensive automated pipelines and test suites, from integration tests on the API gateway to unit tests on smaller services, all run through DevOps pipelines before deployment.
Advanced integration options
Through a team of experts and engineers, we’re paving the way for future artificial intelligence and machine learning implementations with our product.
The results?
Our product has been successfully rolled out to all the retailer’s stores across the UK, and now processes thousands of live KPI data points every minute, converting complex metrics into clear, motivating objectives for the retailer’s employees.
– New greenfield product
– £10M savings
– Full-scale UK roll-out
– Performance power-up
This has led to £15 million in performance-related savings for the retailer, and greatly expanded their capabilities going forward. By using gamification to engage and motivate employees with key business KPIs, our product saves the retailer time, money, and drives meaningful change throughout their organisation.
We’ll help you embrace gamification
We work with clients across various industries to develop advanced gamified products that deliver measurable ROI, drive behavioural change, and can even help smooth the return-to-office transition. Want to find out how gamification can help your business? Get in touch today and schedule a call with us.
About us
HI is a technology and innovation partner empowering tech-first businesses, consumer brands, and consultancies to pioneer, evolve, and grow through engineering, resourcing, and white labelled solutions.
