Gamification! While the term itself might be one of the latest buzzwords in the business world, the idea itself is nowhere new. In fact, using gaming tactics and games as such to engage customers is something credit card companies, airlines and other businesses have been doing for a long time now.
Gamification can be extremely powerful for your business, if used correctly. It can give your business a competitive edge, improve customer and employee engagement and much more. It further adds to your business’s sustainability, which is critical in this ever-changing economy.
So, what are the benefits of gamification for your business and why should you be considering this approach?
1. Lure more customers into your Business
One of the most valuable aspects of gamification is that it is entertaining and fun. By gamifying an experience, you tend to attract more customers and often many aren’t even aware of what’s going on, namely a higher level of brand engagement and increased brand awareness.
Today’s consumer wants to be entertained and gamification presents the most effective way to do this. You will be able to attract new customers and also retain existing ones because you are offering them what they want: fun.
2. Gain Insight into your Customers
Thanks to the way most gamification platforms are set up, you have the possibility to gather data on customers who use your system, allowing you to track and analyze what they do on your website or app.
This generates a lot of valuable data, which you can later process into insights, about your customers. However, keep in mind that it’s worth very little if the data is not analyzed properly. It certainly won’t do much if you just let it sit there, as many organizations tend to do. Luckily, many gamification platforms already come with their own analytics systems built in, which you should definitely be taking advantage of.
3. Boost Customer Loyalty
Gamification helps create a satisfying experience for customers, which leads to happy customers. Offering them rewards for winning contests, quizzes or liking a Facebook page, for example, keeps them coming back for more and builds loyalty. You’re not only engaging them but also giving back and valuing the time they spend engaging with your brand, which is key to building long-term loyalty.
4. Get an Objective View of what you’re doing
Implementing gamification involves moving to automatic and constant data collection, which can be about anything from the productivity of your sales reps to the handling times of your call center staff. This data collection might not be considered that important at first, but it is invaluable because it will give you an objective picture of how your organization is performing.
Employees will no longer be rated based on a manager’s mood or their personal feelings. Everything will be based on hard data. This makes the managers’ lives easier because they don’t have to worry that their personal feelings will cloud their judgment, whether positively or negatively. They know they don’t have to take a chance or make a guess because performance reviews here onwards will be based on concrete data, making them objective.
5. Obtain Customer Feedback effortlessly
Gamification engages customers to visit your website relatively often, which means you have more access to them than the usual amount. Furthermore, it’s been found that surveys that take advantage of gamification have a higher response rates and better quality answers.
In other words, through gamification, you can collect more feedback from your customers, which can be used to improve your products and services. It’s also an excellent opportunity to identify detractors and find ways to solve their problems so you can eventually convert them into promoters and stop them from defecting to other brands.
This approach can also be used to solving complex business problems. You can then take the feedback you gather from customers and apply it to business issues. Remember, innovation requires teamwork – even Steve Jobs needed a team to develop the iPhone. Now, you have an even better option – you can basically ask all your customers to take you to the next level!
6. Improve Adoption Rates of New Solutions
Whether you are trying to implement a new solution in your own business or have developed a new product, adoption can be slow, especially if the solution is complex. Most people are resistant to change, whether they realize it or not. Throw in a complex system that they feel they’ll never be able to understand, and you have a nightmare on your hands.
The easiest way to accelerate adoption is by making the nightmare seem much smaller and more insignificant through education, and some fun that drives engagement. After all, even the most complex product features are much less scary when customers understand how they work.
Training is often dry and boring, though, which is where gamification comes in. It makes learning more fun by engaging users. Concepts are internalized quicker when people are engaged. And this approach can be used both for internal adoption with employees and for a new product with customers. The advantage to the latter is that higher adoption rates translates into more sales.
7. Monitor and Enhance Employee Wellbeing
Happy employees lead to happy customers and the better your internal atmosphere is, the more successful your organization will be. Using gamification can improve relationships between your employees, which leads to a better work environment and, in the end, happier customers.
Encouraging a little competition is also a good way to motivate employees and bring them together. Setting up employee-of-the-month systems charts, establishing a blog where everyone can take part in, creating dashboards where colleagues can offer each other support and offering rewards for tasks completed are all great ways of maintaining a closely knit team that acts as a unit rather than individual parts.
Gamification has a wide range of advantages, both internally and externally. And the biggest benefit has to be that by improving internal engagement and making your employees happy, you automatically extract external results as well because committed, engaged employees make for delighted, loyal customers!
