Prosthetic patients at the Hospital das Clinicas in São Paulo, Brazil, are receiving a new form of treatment. Each patient is fitted with an armband connected to a gamification platform. The platform, designed by Accenture, uses SAP Leonardo capabilities and has several virtual reality dashboards that entertain and encourage patients as they work with their prosthetic limbs. In addition to the dashboards providing improved detecting, measuring and analyzing capability, it also makes monotonous exercises fun and infinitely more engaging. Initial findings suggest that patients who use the gamified armbands have a greater acceptance of their situation, emerge from their sessions with higher self-esteem, and make much more progress during the course of their treatment.
What Is Gamification?
The application of game theory, design, and practices to activities beyond games—is everywhere these days. From a tentative start, the industry seems to have come into its own. Business leaders are no longer asking whether they need to incorporate gamification into their processes. Instead, they’re wondering how best they can do so. The industry has matured and is showing real results. This is part of the reason gamification has grown at such a rapid pace to become a multi-billion dollar industry today, one that is expected to increase to 11.94 billion dollars by 2021.2 There are many ways that gamification can benefit a business. Here are a few ways that gamification can help in driving customer engagement.
Gamification and Customer Onboarding
As far as customer touchpoints go, after making a purchase, the customer onboarding process is the next significant interaction that a customer has with the company. How a customer is onboarded says a lot about how the company treats its customers. It sets the tone for customer interactions and often determines how long the customer will continue to stay with the company.
A product’s onboarding process that requires customers to learn techniques or develop new habits can be tricky and is fraught with risks. The better equipped a customer is, the greater the likelihood that they will benefit from the product. How can businesses ensure that customers learn the intricacies of their products without letting frustration cause them to abandon them altogether? The answer is gamified micro-learning, by which customers are taught to use the product step-by-step using gamification for greater involvement.
“Studies have shown that gamified experiences educate faster than passive reading.”
As a result, many businesses have replaced their ‘Getting started’ 100-page guide with micro ‘just-in-time’ videos that help customers explore core functionality quickly and effortlessly. This is often followed by an interactive session where customers actually perform sample tasks by following on-screen text prompts. Studies have shown that gamified experiences educate faster than passive reading.3 The best example of gamified micro-learning is Microsoft’s Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Clippy.4
When Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, in the 1990s, it came bundled with a game called Solitaire. While it seemed like an innocuous little card game, in effect it introduced the concept of drag-and-drop to a generation of ‘command-line’ computer users. Same with Minesweeper, which introduced the concept of right- and left-click. The fact that we still use both these functionalities today says something about the manner with which it gained popularity.
Clippy, Microsoft Office’s much-loved paperclip mascot, helped users navigate the complex world of word processing, emails and Excel with helpful prompts and suggestions. Today, Slack uses the ever-helpful and funny Slackbot to help new users get onboard. Dropbox encourages users to complete tutorial levels by motivating them with the promise of extra space for each lesson they complete. Users are incentivized to learn how to use Dropbox properly. Gamified micro-learning helps customers easily navigate the obstacle course of adopting new tech, by decreasing their resistance to doing things in a new way.
Gamification and Customer Loyalty
The idea of rewarding customers for making a purchase is itself a gamified notion. It taps into our psychological need of being rewarded and recognized for something we’ve done. It provides the motivation we need to repeat the action over and over. Traditional point-based reward programs are being replaced by newer, AI-driven reward programs that align with the customer’s reality and are more personalized. Mobile-based gamification appeals to the millennials, and the Starbucks Rewards program, perhaps one of the most-loved gamified loyalty programs currently running, makes good use of this.
Gamification and Customer Insights
According to Forrester, “Businesses that use artificial intelligence (AI), big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to uncover new business insights will steal $1.2 trillion per annum from their less informed peers by 2020.”5 Businesses are hungry for customer insights that can drive value creation, which ultimately leads to increased customer engagement. Gamified activities are storehouses of customer data that cannot be found anywhere else. It provides valuable insights about each customer, their intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, passions, thought-processes and more.
Every time a customer participates in a challenge, businesses learn a little more about them. These insights, when combined, paint a better picture of customer’s motivations, habits and value system. Businesses can then personalize communication, offers, incentives and more, which will drive customer engagement.
Customers engage with gamified activities because they gain something—it is fun, it interests them, it energizes them, it challenges them—things that have nothing to do with the product or the service, but have everything to do with the intrinsic value that the customer places on the activity. Customers may walk away from discounts or gifts, but they will find it difficult to refuse something that matters to them.
Conclusion
Gamification has a lot to offer businesses who want to give customers the best experience possible. We’ve only scratched the surface. There’s a lot more to explore. Gamification combined with analytics, and artificial intelligence could lead to highly immersive, highly personalized experiences that prove to be magnets when it comes to engaging with customers. That is the future, and it is nearly within reach. Game on!
References:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/608824/gamification-market-value-worldwide/
http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/317996/file-397237611-pdf/documents/gamification_v3.pdf
Forrester report “Predictions 2017: Artificial Intelligence Will Drive The Insights Revolution.”
