Vinit Kohli, Vice President of MIS at Sibcy Cline

To what extent does our recreational use of technology drive innovation in business? Is business taking the lead or lagging behind?

“We have been looking at the consumerization of technology for years now. The amount of power and the number of tools available on the average smartphone is more powerful than what the average computer had, in most cases, just five years ago. So we have the capabilities and tools to leverage technology, and on top of that, we have hundreds and thousands of applications available for download at any time, now we must understand how to mobilize all this and make it function for our purposes.

Gamification is a great example. We see in wildly popular games like Pokémon Go, which is all about consumerization, but they had the innovative idea to integrate entertainment with the capabilities that a smart device already has, so that it has great value proposition. A business can leverage and learn more from it as they become incubators. Rather than spending hours and hours in research and development, the approach is different now. Now as we look for the next great idea, we are asking if can we come up with a solution, like those we see out there in the market, which can be leveraged for our business and industry, and be equally beneficial to us.  It’s important to recognize the potential for engagement in it and, since it’s all about the experience for millennials, from a branding perspective, to be able to share a brand with that audience that says we are a fun company.

Gamification is not a business proposition directly, but it has great value potential when leveraged for business processes and workflow. We have introduced a mobile app we designed, called “Kick App” to our agents, which is the gamified version of their CRM tools. It allows them to maintain engagement or renew conversation with clients across the years after an initial sale. We have two psychologists in organizational behavior as trainers for our business and we brought them together with our user interface designer, our development team and our executive team, to help ensure that we created and interesting and fun solution.  It’s all about relationship – you will only be able to establish good contact with an individual if you understand how they work.

Another innovative solution Sibcy Cline developed a few years ago is called “Second Story Auctions. The auction site helps clients who need to declutter so they can sell their homes. It has been an interesting business for us and the managing director came from Cintrifuse to handle taking it to the next level of online estate sales.  Technology cannot substitute for the engagement aspects of business relationships, but it certainly can be the enabler, providing the abilities to be successful at what we do. We consider the technologies that consumers are already using and we decide how we can integrate them into our platform to make it more relevant to them.”