A French company with a funny name is rolling onto U.S. shores with a gamified approach to relieving one of the most painful elements of the typical business day: meetings.

Klaxoon SAS launched in 2014 but only set up its U.S. operations in June. The company’s main product is a sort of digital whiteboard that keeps meeting participants engaged by pinging them with a variety of brainstorming tools and challenges.

It’s attacking a problem that most of us can relate to. Meetings are often poorly organized, lack an agenda and spend too much time on issues that most people in the room don’t care about. Recent data is hard to come by, but a survey of 1,300 business professionals commissioned by Verizon Communications Inc. in 1998 found that they attend an average of 60 meetings each month, a task that consumes 37 percent of their time. It’s doubtful that things have changed much since then.

Klaxoon attacks the problem with a shared virtual space that features a variety of quizzes, surveys, challenges and brainstorming tools that a meeting facilitator can launch to gather ideas or assess whether people are paying attention. For example, the organizer can challenge people with multiple-choice quizzes about topics that were discussed or submit a challenge and invite participants to compete for the correct answer. Participants can be named, anonymous or use aliases at the administrator’s discretion. Regardless of the level of disclosure, the organizer can track activity at an individual to determine whether messages get through or, conceivably, if people are daydreaming.

Gamified feedback can also help organizers run better meetings. For example, if most participants are failing to answer some questions correctly, “you probably need to change that question,” said Klaxoon Chief Executive Matthieu Beucher. Twelve years of teaching experience taught him that “if you don’t have a tool to get feedback, you don’t know if they’re understanding.”

A brainstorming feature uses sticky-note metaphors to enable people to submit ideas live or in advance of meeting. Sticky notes can be color-coded, tagged and assigned to categories. People can like and up-vote each other’s ideas, and the whole collection can be organized, aggregated and exported to Excel.

The brainstorming component can be used on a large scale for things like companywide meetings, with people submitting ideas and topics days or weeks in advance. “By the time you get to the meeting, you can have hundreds of ideas,” Beucher said. Between tagging and up-voting, they can be boiled down to a manageable list of topics that people actually want to hear about.

Klaxoon raised $5.6 million last year and claims to already have customers in 114 countries, as well as 90 percent of the largest companies in France. One of its first U.S. customers is HelloWorld Inc., an agency that helps businesses operate sweepstakes, contests, promotions and loyalty programs.

“One of the best features is that people can submit an idea silently, so it shows up on the board and they don’t have to say it out loud,” said Lauren Pietersen, HelloWorld’s director of products and partnerships. She also likes a feature that automatically creates word clouds out of ideas submitted during brainstorming sessions, as well as “live liking,” which enables meeting participants to vote anonymously on ideas in real time. “You don’t have to wait for everyone to get a turn going around the table,” Pietersen said. “You can get everything on the board and take snapshots of the boards along the way,” in the same manner that facilitators rip paper sheets off flip boards and paste them on the wall.

To mark its entry into the U.S., Klaxoon conducted a survey of more than 2,000 American adults and reported that half say they’re being asked to participate in more meetings than they used to and 28 percent believe meetings are getting longer. The survey also found that 38 percent admit to daydreaming during meetings, 24 percent surf the web, 18 percent think about vacation and 12 percent shop online.  The principal reasons respondents say meetings fail are poor articulation of goals, lack of participation and difficulty telling if they are participating at all.

Klaxoon is software-as-a-service that’s licensed on a subscription basis at prices ranging from $10 to $19 per month, depending on volume.

Image: Klaxoon