We (UserVoice) built our kudos and leaderboard system (which we hesitate to call “gamification”) based on the feedback we received from customer support agents who provide great Zappos-style customer service but felt they lacked any sense of accomplishment. We saw a lot of internal customer service reports in these organizations that used screenshots of positive support ticket threads to try and capture the sentiment that we now do with “kudos.”
It’s worth pointing out that there’s really two completely different worlds of customer service: the ugly, painful call center world and the much more humane version that’s coming out of internet companies like Klipfolio (check out my UserConf talk for more about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKapwfmpvew&feature=relmf...). UserVoice users are decidedly from that latter group, so our “gamification” methods focus more on rewarding/ quantifying good work (driven by intrinsic motivations) agents are already doing. I, too, am skeptical that you could simply drop a leaderboard into a United Air Lines call center and get massively better output.
One final thing to note is that we go out of our way to make sure that kudos and our leaderboard are used for friendly agent-to-agent or agent-vs-self competition and do not become something on which managers base performance decisions. As soon as that happens, you end up with the “If you liked my service please give me a 10 in the follow-up survey call” that I’m increasingly hearing when I talk to the “old world” of customer service.
Richard White, CEO - UserVoice