How You Can Use Gamification to Improve Customer Engagement

How You Can Use Gamification to Improve Customer Engagement

The score never interested me, only the game.” – Mae West

Gamification can be defined as the use of gameplay mechanics for non-game applications in order to make them more fun and engaging. This practice can be applied in virtually any industry and any medium and will create fun, engaging experiences that convert users to players. OK, that’s still a bit vague. According to the Gamification Wiki, gamification is the infusion of game design techniques, game mechanics and game style into anything.

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For instance, if you take a look at the concept of work, it bears many similarities to that of game. The only difference is that one is perceived positively while the other negatively. You can break down both concepts into a series of traits:

  • Tasks – are interpreted as repetitive and dull when perceived as work, while game tasks, even though they’re just as repetitive, are perceived as fun.
  • Feedback – is expected only once a year in the case of work and constantly in the case of a game.
  • Goals – work goals are contradictory and vague, while game goals are clear.
  • Rules – seem unclear and opaque in the case of work, while they appear to be clear and transparent in the case of games.
  • Information – seems to be either insufficient or overwhelming in the case of work, while game information seems to be dosed perfectly.
  • Failure – is forbidden and punishable in the case of work, while it’s expected and encouraged as well as spectacular in the case of games.

The breakdown of these two concepts could go on a lot more, but we’ll stick to the traits we’ve highlighted. You understand now why gamification makes a world of difference. When you implement it successfully in a work environment, you may have a potential Google on your hands (Google is notorious for its indoor slides, it’s 20% policy and lots of other things that take the work their employees do and turn it into something fun and desirable).

A great example of gamification is what the Swedish National Society for Road Safety and Volkswagen implemented in Stockholm in an attempt to reduce speeding. They created a Speed Camera Lottery. That is to say, while people caught speeding by the speed cameras were still ticketed and fined, the drivers going under the speed limit were pooled into a lottery that was funded by the fines. This led to a 22% reduction in speed.

So how do you go about gamifying your product or service in order to boost customer engagement? That sounds a lot more difficult than it actually is. What you have to do is identify the six core elements games are powered by and implement them in the thing you want to gamify.

The Core Elements of Gaming

What are the six core elements of games? Easy: desire, incentive, challenge, achievement and reward, feedback and mastery. Knowing that, you just have to make these things happen in your product. You do what the developers of Foursquare did.

Basically, your whole goal is to include the normal actions you want your client to be doing into elements of a game. Like if, for instance, you work in design, you want to create a game-like experience around visiting your site, checking out your portfolio, signing up for your newsletter and, ultimately, hiring you.

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As Elizabeth Shaw states, gamification encourages the “Four Is of Engagement”: Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence. Gamification makes your clients more involved with your brand. Your content will become more meaningful to the aforementioned clients as they interact with your product or service, thus increasing the likelihood of purchase.

When employing gamification techniques, your brand will become more personal as the game creates an intimate experience between the brand and the client, generating the impression of direct one-on-one contact. Furthermore, since most gamification techniques involve various incentives, such as tokens and badges while encouraging users to share your game with their friends, you’ll reach and influence a lot more people by gamifying your product.

Social Media and Competitive Gaming

You’re no stranger to social interaction and loyalty programs as techniques to improve your business. These days, the simple fact that you have a business means you know all about social media and rewarding brand loyalty. It’s become as much of a prerequisite of being an entrepreneur as having a grasp on the concept of currency. How do you mix these aspects of your business with gamification?

You do it by employing the competitive element of most games. This can be broken down into three aspects. First of all, the player will be competing with himself in order to earn more points, credits, coupons or any other reward you’ve set up as the in-game currency.

Second, they compete with their friends and acquaintances that also play the game via leaderboards, badges and various other types of social currency. Third, he competes with all the other users of the game, the large audience your brand is addressing for tangible, real-world currency, products or services in the form of  sweepstakes, giveaways or raffles.

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Use Rewards to Engage Your Clients

As you can gather, virtual rewards are highly important when using gamification. Basically, the first two aspects of your gamified brand give out virtual rewards that are either in-game currency or social currency. Points, tokens, badges, leaderboards – these don’t cost anything to make. And they will keep your clients engaged, make no mistake.

Still, implementing a system of badges and virtual rewards doesn’t guarantee success. If your social strategy involves just these, they probably won’t work. Your virtual rewards are only as valuable as much as your visibility and level of engagement. Let’s clarify: the first tier of competitivity that we explored earlier will only work for a while. Most people lose interest in them sooner or later. That’s why you use social currency to reward users – to keep them playing because, as long as they keep playing, they’re engaged by you and your content.

Now, the social currency you repay these users with is only as valuable as the number of people who’ll see it and who care about it. Look at it this way: if some guy you meet on the street randomly starts muttering to himself you’re great, that doesn’t really impact your social status. If the president mentions that you’re awesome, that’ll probably boost your status a lot more. It’s the same with your company. The more users you have and the more engaged users you have, the more valuable your social currency rewards will be.

To sum it all up: rewards are great and virtual rewards have a lot of power, but they only work if you’re providing the users with a social aspect. Think of it as a game night. People gather in the same place and play Risk or cards or charades or any other game. These games have points and scores and players play for those. Still, the points and scores are not the purpose of the evening – socialization is the objective. The game is just the conduit, the form that the interaction takes.

That being said, this concludes our presentation of gamification and how you can use it in order to improve customer engagement. Let’s recap: gamification is the practice of introducing game-like mechanics for non-game applications in order to make them more fun and engaging.

When gamifying your brand, product or service, you need to create a system of rewards that uses all three levels of natural human competitivity. These rewards are only as valuable as your users perceive them to be. Do you have any insight into gamification? Have you tried it out? Let us know how it worked out in the comment section below!

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