Gamification is a buzzword everyone is talking about, but not many professionals actually have an idea about its application in real life. While we easily imagine a large corporation introducing a pricey gamified platform for boosting employee productivity, for small businesses gamification seems to be out of reach. Gartner predicts that by 2016 gamification will become a standard practice for building consumer loyalty and driving marketing – spread all over the market. Here are 5 key tips to help you leverage gamification in your small business.
- Know your game
In its essence gamification is based on application of game mechanisms onto non-gaming contexts ranging from project management to marketing or recruitment. Managers use game props like points, badges and levels in order to make their projects more competitive and fun. Gamification can be played on the corporate intranet or online. An example of online gamification is rummy games – click here to play rummy online and see the difference.
Gamification will work for every area which to some degree depends on motivation and engagement. That’s why gamified strategies can be used both internally, in relation to employees, and externally – to boost consumers’ engagement, inspire them to perform specific tasks and build brand loyalty.
How does gamification work? Basically, organizers reward talented players and publicly recognize their achievement by granting them points or badges through tournaments which allow to enter new levels that showcase their professional excellence. Names of the top players are displayed on social leader boards, motivating others to work harder for achieving a higher position on the board and making their success visible to others.
- Employee motivation
As you can imagine, in the context of a small business where roles are flexible and there are always too many things to do, keeping employees motivated is a challenge. Small businesses rarely splurge on expensive integration days, so gamification can easily become your tool for maintaining a high level of productivity and motivation.
By raising the bar and offering incentives or rewards, you’ll inspire your team to use their time at the office in an effective way and have lots of fun at it.
How to start a gamified process? Think about a typical day at your office – are there any tasks your employees do that are repetitive and boring? Well, gamification strategies are there to help you make them interesting again. To improve collaboration and communication, as well as give your employees a boost of energy, divide them into groups of 2-4 that will compete against each other in the number of completed tasks.
Always give feedback in real-time and accurately recognize top talent – you don’t want to risk gamified activities ruining your internal structure. Have a look at this list of the essential gamification techniques you can use to easily spice up the daily life at your workplace:
- assign points to tasks
- reward players in real-time
- rewards should be given after achieving certain stages in the game
- when players reach a level, unlock additional rewards
- recognize the most talented players on a leader board – free social platforms like Yammer can be a great help in showcasing the weekly or monthly results of your game.
- Customer engagement
Gamification can also serve as an excellent strategy for building a loyal community of consumers around your brand. If you do it right, you’ll generate a powerful marketing machine where consumers will be telling each other about your brand, some of them becoming your brand evangelists. We all know that for small businesses word of mouth is the single best marketing strategy – especially in the age of social media.
One of the meeting points between you and consumers are trading shows and events where small businesses market their offer and interact with potential customers. If you’re planning to attend a trade show soon, don’t hesitate to try out some gamified tactics to engage with consumers.
What exactly can you do? Reward attendees with points for listening to your sessions or by visiting your booth and completing specific tasks (for instance leaving their contact information). After the show, consumers will login to your website, fill in all points they gained during the show and get coupons or discounts for your products or services.
Another important platform for engagement are mobile apps you can use to spice up your social media channels. By granting users access to such apps, you’ll not only spread brand awareness and build a positive image of your business, but also gather key data on customer behavior, such as what kind of products they buy, when they make a purchase or even their contact information for further marketing activities.
- Customer service
Customer service is another area that can greatly benefit from some gaming. Gamification applied to the following sections of customer service will help you to revamp it and make contacting you exciting for customers.
First, there’s waiting on hold. Reward your customers for waiting on hold – you can use a simple application like the one developed at AMEX, “Tweet Your Way to Savings”, where you send key messages and hashtags to customers who are waiting on hold. When customers tweet something using those hashtags, you can reward them with points or special discounts.
Self-service channels could use some gamified treatment as well. If you think customers could easily solve some non-urgent issues by themselves – with the use of your FAQs, website, or forums – encourage this kind of behavior by giving rewards for their effort.
The last point is again about your employees – specifically those responsible for flawless customer service. If you’re interested to see who is the most productive customer service representative, you can use gamified software to gain lots of data and analytics. Such programs will show you the time it takes to assign a support ticket and for your employees to react and send a response. Sometimes, such apps will publish a weekly or monthly leader boards featuring names of the most efficient employees.
- Consumer loyalty
Finally, there’s an important point that small businesses often struggle with – consumer loyalty. Loyalty is built on exchange – as a business, you need to give something really special to your customers for staying loyal to your brand. Most of the time, small businesses are at a loss as to what could be that exchange object.
Gamification can help you to build a truly efficient reward system for the most loyal customers. Using apps or special software, you’ll give consumers points for their purchases, which shared on social media will in turn grant them discounts and special offers. Customers engaged in point games will be thrilled to compete against each other, boosting their brand loyalty and adding a sense of excitement to your product or service.
As you can see, gamification is absolutely within the means of small businesses – considering the kind of benefits brought by gamified tactics to both employees and consumers, there’s really no other way than to enter the game and start playing right now.