How To Bring Gamification Into Your Business

Innovation How To Bring Gamification Into Your Business Aleksandrs Malins Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Aug 5, 2022, 10:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Founder and CEO of FortySeven Software Professionals , with over a decade of experience advising F500 companies and growth-stage startups.

getty “Let’s add this feature into the system. It will help us create a new habit when our customers make purchases. ” This request was made by a product owner during the usual sprint.

For some, this won’t mean anything. But for us, it was part of gamification support that was implemented into a project we were developing. What is gamification? Well, it has different definitions.

Some say that it injects gameplay aspects and rewards into everyday activities. I think about it as an opportunity for people to be motivated by being rewarded for some action. You can use gamification for internal employees as well as external users, such as customers that you want to reward for their usage of your system or engagement, which, in turn, can drive revenue.

Gamification isn’t the same as loyalty programs. Although loyalty programs may be similar, gamification is a model under which a user is rewarded for doing some action with your products or system and isn’t always related to purchasing. Basically, you do something, and you get something.

Using this win-win strategy, both your company and customers can receive benefits. For the company, it becomes easier to track the actions of the customers and to get them to form new habits using the features they’re interested in by promoting them within the system. Getting back to the project that I mentioned in the beginning, our internal research based on data we received through all iterations showed that people who tried a new feature three or more times turned it into a new habit.

How is this related to gamification? Well, in gamification, you’re usually repeating the same action multiple times. The main idea for the product owner is to drive a new consumer habit when using the new or updated functionality. Why do people like gamification? The whole idea of gamification is to reward the users for a small effort.

It’s not only about the money, gift cards or other financial rewards—it can also be about earning badges, higher status or other psychological rewards. People are motivated by being rewarded for their actions. According to scientific research , gamification is strongly driven by both utilitarian and hedonic benefits and motivations.

MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Why are companies using gamification? Companies usually are eager to drive revenues, engagement and performance. Gamification can provide businesses with a wealth of customer behavior data and valuable insights. This data can help businesses improve and optimize operational processes and drive customer engagement and retention.

Gamification is used in everything from smart assistants and the metaverse to e-commerce. What are the challenges of implementing gamification? It’s not always easy to implement gamification to existing systems, especially if the systems are complex. The three main challenges you may run into—and how to overcome them—include: 1.

Integration Into The Existing System: Consider integrating a SaaS-based gamification system and develop all relevant telemetry and UI hooks for enabling gamification features. Integrations usually include both the telemetry system and interface. Telemetry provides reporting of user interactions and statistics from a gamification system, and the interface shows what exactly the user has achieved.

For example, when shopping through Alexa, doing some actions (using specific features) may result in receiving certain promotions. The same occurs with Waze: The more you drive your car, the higher you’ll rank in the hierarchy. But, again, we need to remember that gamification is made not only for having fun with the interface.

Usually, companies are testing some features, and by providing new features through a gamification approach, they receive the data they need. 2. Keeping Track Of The Progress: To track progress, you need to first create internal rules and keep your main goals in mind.

Out-of-the-box gamification systems come with predefined dashboards for such tracking and configurations. When you incorporate gamification within your project, you can view it as a marketing campaign for business development. The users of a gamification system are performing some action that they receive something for.

That’s why the value of the gamification system is evaluated by its usage, and it’s always about a win-win strategy for the company and the users. Tracking the results can tell you which features work and which don’t before implementing them into the whole system, and it can help better determine the target audience for certain features, as well as the best ways to motivate them. 3.

Staying Fair: When using all the data and analyzing the behavior of users, we always need to think about being fair to both the users and the company. If you don’t, users will lose interest or, worse, spread negative feedback that can cause a hit on your company’s reputation (and profits). What is the future of gamification? The future of gamification is almost here.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence systems are developing rapidly, changing the environment and our perception of reality. In my opinion, it’s very important to find the right balance when implementing gamification. Make sure that the features that drive engagement to deliver actual value to the customer.

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