Gamification in business is gaining steam as more companies struggle to retain staff in a competitive marketplace and keep customers loyal. And smart managers realise that you can use modern tools like gamification to engage employees and customers to carve out market share.
But why is NOW the time to make those gains?
According to The Guardian, “A survey of 6,000 workers by the recruitment firm Randstad UK found that 69% of them were feeling confident about moving to a new role in the next few months, with 24% planning a change within three to six months.”
Usually, that number would be more like 11%. So the risk is greater than ever before as more than half of your employees might be considering a move.
So, given the landscape, how can you boost performance while investing in your people? How can you engage employees and make them feel valued? How can you make working more FUN? And what software will help you win and keep clients & customers?
We’re breaking down how gamification in business can give you a competitive advantage.
But what is Gamification?
Gamification is a large word for the simple concept of adding psychological triggers and game elements into a website, app, process or online community.
And it got its name in 2002, gaining steam in the decades to follow as an established engagement tool for customer and employee-facing systems.
That’s because gamification in business has real, tangible positive impacts on key performance indicators.
The most important of these:
It works to drive profit.
Games have a rich and storied history and that’s because people like them. Even the Romans used dice that tabletop gamers would recognise today. And in medieval times knights queued up in the joust before roaring crowds.
Today, Fortnite and Warzone gamers fill arenas as they battle for K/D supremacy. Humans need competition. And applying a competitive element to your product, workplace or service just increases our rudimentary and primal connection to it.
We need to feel rewarded, socialised, accomplished and more. Games are one way to achieve that feeling of self-expression and status humans crave. And in some ways, even cheering another on counts.
Games & Gamification
Gamification just takes that innate desire for proving oneself, completing feats or socialising and pops it into a new system. It can make practice fun. It can make the routine less droll.
It can ensure things are done to spec without the need for dull checklists. And over time, people build skills in whatever games they play. They build knowledge even by being supporters (ask any football fan).
And they become quicker and more comfortable with complex tasks and challenging decisions.
Overall this makes us better at our jobs or more enraptured with a company. And it’s probably that dopamine hit. Dopamine is a feel-good brain chemical that also helps you focus, stay motivated and weather setbacks.
It’s because of our primordial brains and happy juice that gamification in business works. But where do we find it?
See how companies are using gamification. Check out our gamification examples list.
Where do we find employee-focused gamification in business?
1. Learning & Training
Remember that skill-building component? Well, it’s no surprise then that gamification in business is often found focused on learning and training team members.
Especially since there are so many types of people in our modern workforces, we need a way to speak to them all. In comes gaming.
Gamification for business provides that universal pull. Our primordial brains love games. And the only thing you need to do is make sure the rewards align with what those brains want.
Try a mix of social, status, financial and enriching rewards to identify the right plan for your team. To get these rewards, make sure your games identify skills you need your team to improve and information you’ll want them to hold on to.
Practice makes comfort. Expand your experiences regularly so every stretch won’t feel like your first. – Gina Greenlee
Gamification in corporate learning for employee-facing applications is largely used to:
- Keep skills up to standard
- Improve overall knowledge
- Boost motivation
- Improve data retention
- Encourage self-directed learning
- Grow team skills
- Track and measure activities and behaviours
- Improve comfort with problem-solving
- Incentivise performance at the top
- Help those who are underperforming
- Give immediate feedback
Click here to know more about Gamification in Business for Learning & Training
2. Employee Engagement
While we’ve moved the needle a bit on engagement in the last decade, it’s still under 15%. That means the vast majority of your employees do not care about their job. And it’s costing companies between $450-500 BILLION dollars.
Oh, and that disengagement comes with a host of management problems too like absenteeism, poor attitude, low work quality and more.
This impacts the performance of your other employees and can result in a loss of customers too. (Customers like happy workers.) Over time, poor employee engagement erodes your bottom line.
Create caring and robust connections between every employee and their work, customers, leaders, managers, and the organization to achieve results that matter to everyone in this sentence.” – David Zinger
Gamification in business works because it helps everyone see how their work matters. It creates a fun way to make those connections and helps teams push further than they thought possible through extrinsic and/or intrinsic motivators.
And through games, you’ll trigger expected behaviours that lead to customer retention & acquisition, less disengagement and better overall job satisfaction.
Imagine you have a chronic disease like diabetes. What would make you feel more comfortable – yearly checkups or hourly monitoring?
The more frequent one, right? And that makes sense.
Our health is a very important part of our lives. But so are our jobs. However, we rarely get access to the same quality of regular reporting that we’d see in the medical space. Why is that? Poor management.
A manager sets objectives, organizes, motivates, and communicates, sets yardsticks, and measures to develop people. – Peter Drucker
To develop a great team, you need to know what the goal is and track how you’re doing against that goal. The more often you measure, the more you’ll notice trends.
When you see a situation developing, you can act quickly to take corrective action or pull resources to develop an opportunity. That’s what a doctor would do if they saw your condition change.
Bizarrely, gamification in business can actually provide a fun way to make that happen.
See in this infographic how Gamification in business can transform management.
4. Contact Centers
Do you think yelling at your call center team about lower-than-average First Call Resolution, Average Abandonment or Average Handling Time stats will help? Or perhaps there’s a better way to get the results you want…
Maybe there’s some proactive action you can take to improve customer satisfaction?
You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be too easily duplicated. But a strong customer service culture cannot be copied. – Jerry Fritz
You need to find a way to engage our primordial brains so you get the performance increases you want in a way that doesn’t FEEL like work. Gamification is one way to do that.
Why should you be using Gamification in your Contact Center?
When stats start to slip, there are usually a few common causes. Call centers are stressful places and there’s often not a lot of time to make up for a poor culture before it becomes embedded.
Gamification helps call centers improve their:
- Morale – When every minute counts some people can feel left out. Favouritism can grow. Unfairness can flourish. And people can become despondent and lose sight of the goal. With gamification, you set the goals. You bring the enforcement into a place of automation, not manager power. And through that, you create a natural sense of fairness.
- Performance – What the senior team cares about and what floor managers monitor can sometimes become disjointed. With gamification, you’re sending the KPIs from the top and you’re reporting on what matters. Your agents can easily see and understand what you’re asking them to do and how it will positively impact them when performance targets are met.
- Engagement – With a sea of contact center agents, it’s easy for your team members to feel like a number. How can they stand out for the right reasons? Gamification works to provide challenges they understand and a sense of gratification when they achieve them. And that’s reinforced by rewards they care about so they do it again and again.
- Transparency – No one likes a moving goalpost. Now, with gamification in business, you can set the goals and publicly stick to them. That provides a sense of fairness and transparency your team really needs to give their best.
- Support – We know that games have a fun side effect of teaching new skills. That’s great. But what about the team members who don’t get it right away? (Not everyone is great at chess, for example.) Well, that’s where support comes in. Through gamification, you develop your team by putting management in the right place at the right time to help everyone grow.
- Value – Human resources. Well, they’re only resources if they have the skills needed to perform well. Gamification helps to build skills so that your agent pool becomes better at what you need them to do. That creates real human capital.
See more gamification benefits in the call centre gamification Infographic.
Click here to read more about Gamification in business for Contact Centers.
How to recognize signs of a toxic environment?
- No empathy
- No support
- No appreciation
- Team feels demotivated
- Management plays favourites
- Rewards are not equal
- Loyalty is damaged
- Priorities are vague or misaligned
- Management sabotages their team
- Micromanagement or takeover
- Dishonesty is rewarded
- Work is not delegated
- Too much emphasis on detail
- The team cannot make decisions
- Reporting on everything, nitpicking
- Experience is not valued
According to Retorio, “In the US, 20% of employees [left] within the past five years due to a sick culture; this turnover costs greater than $223 billion.” So you can’t really afford to let a toxic culture bed in.
How can Gamification help your sales team?
By providing clear goals, measurement and reporting frequency, transparency is improved. The mistrust and favouritism in a sick culture can’t thrive.
Management doesn’t get bogged down looking at every detail and they can focus on performance coaching team members who need it while high-performers get rewarded in ways they care about. This promotes equality and job satisfaction.
6. Development Teams
If you work in IT, you know how many pieces they’re jugging at the same time to get a project off the ground. Successful collaboration needs clear goals, record keeping and discipline. But it’s easy to get off track.
What are the common problems in IT departments?
- Goals are not communicated which leads to demotivation.
- No one is sure what direction to move in or how they’re performing
- There’s no one looking after the quality and time management.
- Managers don’t know what to look for and focus on silly metrics.
- The daily work is repetitive and soulless.
How is Gamification used for Development Teams?
Great project management with a strong leader is key for a smooth IT project rollout. Smart leaders use gamification to create a link between the work they want to be done (and when) and the highly-skilled people doing that work.
They have set KPIs (agreed in advance) and they use gamification in business to make challenges for the IT team which reinforce those KPIs.
That might be different project stages, response rate, QA or other project elements. This allows them to keep an eye on what matters most to correct lagging project issues before they become roadblocks.
Discover what are the characteristics of high performance teams with this infographic.
Click here to know more about Gamification in Development Teams.
1. Community Engagement
If you don’t have a space for your customers to congregate, you’re missing a trick. An engaged community can tell you a lot about what you’re doing right and wrong.
But if you’re not seeing any back and forth then chances are your community is lacking social buy-in, loyalty, benefits, knowledge, general info, two-way chat, uniqueness or interest.
How do you turn customers into fans? Gamification is the choice of big names like Airbnb, Starbucks, Google and more.
How is Gamification used in Community Engagement?
Gamification is used in community engagement because it increases:
- Engagement Levels: It rewards customers for doing what you want them to do with coupons, status or perks.
- Social Interaction: It provides a healthy competition as people see how they compare and can discuss and share.
- Social Proof: It links our personal life with the brand through social media and stimulates herd behaviour.
- Education: It helps people learn how to use the product or service better and share tips.
- Communication and User Experience: It helps the company learn what they’re doing right (or wrong.)
- Product and Brand Awareness: It helps spread the word as users advocate for the brand online and in person.
- Loyalty: It encourages repeat purchases and rewards loyalty through incentives.
- Demand: It creates scarcity and drives up demand.
- Sense of Achievement: It provides feel-good chemicals when something new is unlocked.
Learn more about how to use gamification in your online community here.
2. Customer Service
No one joins a customer-facing department with the goal of giving poor service, but sometimes problems creep in. That can look like this:
- Failure to meet obligations – customers don’t get a solution or it takes too long.
- Lack of professionalism – customers notice agents are unhappy or the customer is misled to achieve sales commissions.
- Lack of concentration – contact center agents are in a rush so don’t provide the right information or get enough into to provide a solution.
- Unavailability – there are not enough agents available to help customers
- Lack of empathy – customers feel the contact center agents don’t understand their perspective.
How does Gamification in Customer Service benefit clients?
Gamification for customer service can provide an engaging way to prevent service problems. By triggering rewards against key metrics, agents remain available, professional, concentrated, empathic and solution-focused.
If there is a performance gap, gamification can provide an avenue for a fun training and upskilling path. When used in the CS department, gamification can lead to happier employees that are focused on delivering timely support to your customers.
3. Sales
Did you know that 77% of people call some items by popular brand names? Wouldn’t you want your product to be the next Coke, Kleenex or Q-tip? The key to this is largely brand recognition. And the more people see and interact with your brand, the more likely they are to remember it.
This mere-exposure effect is critical to launching sales initiatives in new markets or territories. You need to find a way to break through the noise and reach your customers in a memorable way.
How does Gamification in Sales benefit customers?
With gamification, customers can learn about your product from something more engaging than an advertisement.
Gamification works on your potential targets in the same way it does in your team – it encourages action. So, if you want your website targets to buy, gamification can:
- Educate – using games and interventions to train your clients about what your brand does.
- Engage – provide offers, discounts and incentives to try the project or interact with the brand and its community more deeply.
- Listen – get feedback from visitors even before they become paying customers, so you can make changes to attract more customers.
Learn more about Gamification in retail here.
4. Education & Training
“The eLearning industry has grown by over 900% since 2000,” according to Findstack.
That makes this digital form of learning and training near-ubiquitous. And with all the competition in the marketplace, it’s hard to know if you’re doing it right.
What does successful online learning look like? And where is digital training letting our customers and team members down?
- Lack of communication – learners aren’t told when they’ve completed a module, so it feels endless.
- Inability to Report Success – there’s no link between the learning and the behaviours you want from clients and employees.
- It’s Just Boring – the content is dry and the narrative is nonexistent.
How does Gamification in Education and Training benefit consumers?
Gamification in business helps with education and training by providing a fun, engaging place to build skills and behaviours. It works on team members, managers and customers in the same way by pulling emotional levers and injecting fun into the experience.
- Dynamic – interactions are different each time and the outcomes for success are surprising.
- Fun – any boring tasks are enhanced with milestones, graphical media and more.
- Analysis – learnings are gathered following team or client completion or abandonment of the gamified lessons.
- Cost – it’s a cost-effective way to deliver learning at a large scale with high adoption.
See the main 12 benefits of using Gamification in Business for Learning with this infographic.
5. Custom App
Did you know? 80 percent of apps are abandoned following the first use. And why is that? Largely, it’s because they are unoriginal with a bad user experience and a poor user interface.
If your users don’t like the way your app looks or performs, then they are not going to return. A dull, cluttered, clunky app will get uninstalled at the first opportunity.
How Gamification in Apps is used to help user engagement
Are you familiar with the Duolingo, FitBit or CodeAcademy GO apps?
Not only are they veritable household names, but they do gamification in business very well. Let’s explore what techniques they apply and how their apps work to drive user engagement.
Duolingo – 500 million users.
- Reward: Users get lingots when they complete lessons.
- Leader Boards: Users can compare how they are doing with their friends for social proof.
- Point & Level System: Users level up when they are active on the app and complete lessons.
- Badges: Users get badges when they achieve milestones.
FitBit– 31 million users.
- Badges: When users hit special milestones they get a public badge.
- Social Engagement: Users can link their social media to join real-life challenges.
- Virtual Tour: Users can virtually ‘walk’ a city which provides an exciting way to get fit.
CodeAcademy GO- 45 million users.
- Badges: Users get badges when they complete skills and courses.
- Progress: Users can see what they’ve done and what’s to come.
- Points: Users get points when they complete an exercise.
Starbucks- 500.000+ users.
- Points: Gain 2 stars for every 1 dollar spent.
- Loss Aversion: Don’t miss their double-star day.
- Reward: You can exchange stars for benefits like free brewed coffee & tea. Or get a birthday treat.
Fitocracy- 12,500,000 users.
- Points & Level System – Earn points either for completing a workout or Fitocracy assessment. When you accumulate x amount of points, you level up.
- Achievements/ Rewards – Receive badges for achievements. For example, running your first 5km or cycling certain milestone distances.
- Quests – Similar to achievements, but generally with multiple tasks. For example, “try three different shoulder exercises within 7 days” or “century push: perform 100 push ups in as few sets as possible.”
- Challenges – Basically works like a competition, but on a larger scale. You can create challenges with other groups.
- Competition & Leader Board – Start a competition with another member. During the duel, you can check both performance and results.
Their formula is clear. Just like the three apps above – the more interesting, entertaining and engaging your mobile app is, the more your audience is going to love it.
Not only will the user engagement skyrocket, but also gamifying your app will make your users more loyal to your brand, they will be the best reviewers and recommenders of your product.
How can you harness this success? Gamify your app to provide as many psychological hooks as you can that entertain, encourage and excite your users.
See how you can make people engage and interact with your app here.
6. Customer Loyalty
It makes sense to keep your customers. In fact, it costs 5x as much to win new business. But many companies don’t have the right level of focus on customer loyalty. If you’re seeing fewer returning customers, what could be the cause? Often, it’s low engagement, low brand awareness, lack of knowledge or a poor customer experience at the root of the reduction.
How does Gamification benefit consumers?
Gamification in business can boost customer loyalty by:
- Higher levels of engagement – providing more touchpoints with your brand and affirming behaviours you want.
- Learning – teaching your customers about your products/services and how to use them.
- Measure customer retention and satisfaction – track where the quick wins are so you can target them.
- Training – ensuring your team is up to speed and providing good service.
Loyal customers refer more people and bring in more business. They will also buy other products and services from you. Not to mention, it’s much more expensive and time-consuming to acquire new business than to build upon an existing relationship.
Make new customers but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold.
Yes. Old is gold. Undoubtedly having a tool to make existing clients click with your brand and communicate gratitude for your customers’ business, in the form of small tangible rewards and positive incentives will only benefit the connection, the relationship you have with them.
Conclusion
Times have changed and so have people. Gamification in business is no longer a new concept and over the years more and more companies are adopting this new way of working.
Engagement and performance are at the top of the list of priorities for growing companies. Retaining and training talent saves money. Engaging and motivating employees increases performance and generates more value with the same resources.
A customized 360 degree Gamification solution is a powerful asset which can help you experience positive changes and results across the organization.
Mambo’s Gamification Software provides all the missing tools for engagement and performance in your business. It delivers a complete package structured to engage your employees, customers, learners and even fans.
With the Mambo Gamification Platform, work has never been so much fun!
Let’s have a discovery discussion about your gamification needs and how we can help you meet them.
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