Your Answer to Lackluster Customer and Employee Engagement: Add Fun. Turning business processes into games -- the idea behind the trendy buzzword "gamification" -- encourages frequent participation and makes mundane tasks entertaining.

By Catherine Clifford

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Gamification -- a hot buzzword these days -- is the business equivalent of mixing broccoli into mac and cheese. It's a way of making predictable, boring workplace tasks more engaging for employees and customers.

And it seems to be working. By taking business processes such as compliance training and turning them into a participatory, competitive games, employees tend to be more receptive to tasks that you need them to do anyways. Start recognizing the winners and doling out prizes and all of a sudden your staff is actually smiling at work.

Related: Great at World of Warcraft? Put It on Your Resume.

And if you make a game for your customers to play, the more time they are willing to spend on your website or app, the more they are going to read the content on your website and the more money they will spend with your brand, according to the infographic generated by Column Five Media on behalf of business-expense software provider Concur.

By the end of this year, approximately 7 in 10 of the biggest 200 organizations in the world will have at least on gamification app, according to this infographic.

Check it out -- and get your game on.

Click to Enlarge+
Your Answer to Lackluster Customer and Employee Engagement: Add Fun. (Infographic) Related: Gamification Tapped by Some Employers to Recruit Candidates
Catherine Clifford

Senior Entrepreneurship Writer at CNBC

Catherine Clifford is senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC. She was formerly a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com, the small business reporter at CNNMoney and an assistant in the New York bureau for CNN. Clifford attended Columbia University where she earned a bachelor's degree. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can follow her on Twitter at @CatClifford.

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