Certainly, you already felt demotivated in your company.
Have you ever felt that your teams are not engaged nor motivated, leading to low productivity? Or that your customers aren’t as loyal to your business as you would like them to?
Nowadays, it is increasingly difficult to motivate and retain customers or employees, but there is one solution: Gamification.
What is Gamification?
Gamification can be described as: “the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals” (Burke 2014). Across all kinds of activities, gamification can engage and motivate people using game mechanics such as badges, points, levels and leader boards.
In case you are wondering, gamification not only apply technology to old engagement models but also creates entirely new engagement models, targeting new communities of people and motivating them to achieve goals they may not even know they have. Of course, if player´s goals are aligned with the organization´s goals, then organizations goals will be achieved. In simple terms, gamification takes the motivational techniques (engaging with competition, encouraging to collaborate in teams, giving status by levelling up, and enabling them to earn points) to motivate people and uses them in nongame contexts.
Gamification wasn’t born yesterday
Gamification dates back to the year 1896 when S&H Green Stamps sold stamps to retailers, who used them to reward customers for their loyalty. In 2021, 125 years later, gamification has its predicted market value of $11,94 billion, almost three times more compared to 2016.
As previously mentioned, gamification uses game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. Engagement and motivation are a huge benefit to teams, citizens and customers but gamification leverage so much more benefits. With gamification, a three-hundred-page training manual can be reduced to the size of a smartphone. Teams can train new members through gamification and completely transform the learning experience. Beyond this, companies can engage their employees giving them the possibility to achieve personal goals like some deliveries per month or several sales for example. By achieving personal goals, employees will be more motivated and engaged to the company and consequently, productivity will increase. Through gamification, teams can healthily compete between them and this will, overall, increase motivation, engagement and better individuals and collective results.
Gamification can do wonderful things in a corporate environment but could be a great platform to engage customers too. With specific game mechanics gamification (like challenges, levels, points, etc.) enterprises can motivate customers towards achieving their goals (e.g. sales targets). As previously mentioned it’s important not to think only about the organizational goals. Customers goals should be aligned with the organization’s goals.
Today it is more difficult to engage new customers, given there is much more information online and it is really important to engage and motivate them to become loyal customers in the future.
With gamification, companies have a great opportunity to know more about their customers
Specific game mechanics like surveys or quizzes are a great way to get customers’ feedback. Points and leader boards, for example, shows which customers are the most profitable for the business. Furthermore, gamification can be a good platform to help to achieve Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A reward system can help customers achieving their specific performance indicators, such as the ratio of deliveries per month or the number of sales per week.
We all heard about how smart cities and gamification can help improve their citizen’s experience. Through gamification, city councils have a powerful platform to change citizens behaviours, with gamification metrics like challenges, points or even rewards. Imagine a city council that reward citizens for recycling, giving points just for correctly separating trash. And then, these points allow citizens to get a voucher for free ice cream in the local market.
Climate change is a big deal, and all citizens should be aware of it and how they should change their behaviours to help to protect the environment. Through gamification, city councils have a great opportunity to change citizens behaviours. Gamification platforms reward citizens for their (good) behaviours, which make citizens more motivated and more engaged.
And it is really simple to implement gamification. Today everyone has a smartphone, so everyone can use gamification, either through existing apps or new apps. Some companies already have an app for their customers or teams, and it is possible to integrate the gamification concept into the existing apps.
