Abusive customers. Low pay. Tuberculosis infections. Customer support can be a miserable job. Software makers have long promised to improve the life of customer support reps, and now they're at it again. This time, they want to turn customer support into a game.

They call it gamification. The idea is to take familiar aspects of electronic games and apply them to customer support software and other applications used in the business world. This often involves awarding points for tasks and some sort of system for turning those points into other rewards, like a "badge" attached to your online profile or perhaps prizes or bonus pay.

Companies like Badgeville and Bunchball help businesses add gamification to existing software – such as the customer relationship management service Salesforce.com or the help-desk service Zendesk – while other outfits are adding game mechanics directly to their own applications.

Just last week, a startup called PlayVox debuted with a private social network designed for contact centers that includes a gamified training system. Other gamified tools are offered by help desk services like UserVoice and FreshDesk. UserVoice offers a gamified help desk app that includes something called "Kudos," which lets customers award points to agents for a job well done. Agents are then rated on a leaderboard.

On some level, the practice makes sense. The modern web has shown that even outside the context of game, people respond to the sort of rewards offered by these new-age applications. Jonathan Taylor, who works for a software company called Klipfolio and spends part of his time as customer service representative, has first-hand experience with UserVoice, and he says the benefits are very real.

"Each time one of us gets a kudos, we give a little 'woot' and share our success with the whole office," he says. "I think it's so exciting because you know that you've not only solved a customer's issue, but you've made an impression on them."

Taylor says the company also uses the Kudo leaderboard to track the number of kudos each customer service representative gets from customers. It's stoked something of a competition in the office, one in which our customers are the true winners," he says.

But some believe gamification may do more harm than good. Kathy Sierra, a game designer who has given talks on the dark side of gamification, tells Wired that game designers and scholars are almost universally against gamification.

As Sierra points out, gamification replaces an intrinsic reward with an extrinsic one. In other words, it shifts a participant's motivation from doing something because it is inherently rewarding to doing it for some other reason that isn't as meaningful. This, she says, is ultimately less motivating.

'One could argue that customer service is crap work and therefore anything to make it more tolerable is good, but this is no path to improving customer experience. You cannot incentivize caring. You can, of course, incentivize things like how quickly they get a customer off the phone.'

— Kathy SierraSierra cites research from University of Rochester psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, which was popularized by Dan Pink's book Drive. Deci and Ryan concluded that the most powerful motivators for employees are the mastery of the task at hand, autonomy, and something called relatedness, which might involve helping a customer with a meaningful problem. Gamification replaces these motivators with extrinsic motivators like points and badges.

The other problem is that gamified applications aren't necessarily fun. Most of what is called gamification would be better described as pointsification, according to game designer Margaret Robertson. "What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience," she wrote in a 2010 blog post

In the end gamification could be just a way for companies to keep an eye on their employees. Companies frequently track the amount of time service agents spend on calls, or the average time it takes them to resolve help-desk tickets. Some call centers go so far as to implement a points system based on attendance and tardiness, and others provide incentives for "up-selling" customers. Adding points and badges into the software they use is just another way of doing the same old thing.

The quote PlayVox uses from its banner customer, GroupOn Latin America, is telling: "PlayVox lets us detect and make a quick diagnosis of underperforming agents or those who ignore certain important procedures in serving our customers." The emphasis is on making life easier for managers, not for employees.

Sierra says there is a place to use gamification in the workplace, and that's when workers are developing rote skills that need to be made automatic. "These things – just like having to memorize times tables – are not intrinsically rewarding," she says. "So there is no danger of snuffing out intrinsic motivation and replacing it with extrinsic motivation."

"One could argue that customer service is crap work and therefore anything to make it more tolerable is good, but this is no path to improving customer experience," she says. "You cannot incentivize caring. You can, of course, incentivize things like how quickly they get a customer off the phone."

Couldn't gamification be used to re-enforce positive intrinsic rewards by providing feedback that allows customer service workers to do better work, as Jonathan Taylor indicates? Sierra acknowledges that something like customer feedback in the form of "kudos" can be a good thing, assuming that there isn't a way to game the system. The real danger, she explains, is in gamficiation systems where the "player" has no real meaningful decisions to make, where points are simply awarded or not awarded based on a fixed system. In other words, you want to award points to people just for showing up.

But she says that running a "leaderboard" is still a poor move. She explains that although feedback can be helpful for building mastery, when tracking goes beyond training and becomes part of day-to-day work takes the mind of the task at hand. "It brings in that part of the brain that – subconsciously – says this is why I do this: for the leaderboard status," she says.

In that regard, companies like PlayVox, which focus on training, are on the right track.

Rather than gamification, Sierra says companies would be better off trying to make the work more intrinsically rewarding. She cites Zappos as an example of a company that has made customer service better for both customers and employes by empowering its employees to make more independent decisions. She says training in areas like understanding the psychology of customers, or connecting employees to a larger context would also be helpful.

That hits on the real problem of gamification, which is that it doesn't deal with the most alienating aspects of the job – low pay, lack of job security, high stress, verbal abuse from customers, etc. While company culture will vary wildly from small tech startups to large call centers, there are things companies can do to improve their employees' situations. A recent Stanford study found that employees of a call center in China were both happier and more productive if they were allowed to work from home. They didn't need more points.

This story has been updated to correct the statement that Kathy Sierra gave a talk on the dark side of gamification at SXSW. Sierra was scheduled to present, but had to cancel due to illness. She has given similar talks at other events.