Introduction

Today, businesses are undergoing “Digital Transformation” to remain recognized in their competitive market and are looking at building “Digital CRM”. Studies have shown that while organizations have increased their investments in digitalizing their platforms, two-thirds of digital transformation projects fail mainly due to workforce behavioral issues and lack of customer engagement. Gamification, here, can come to the rescue improving employees’ engagement and helping them adapt to the central theme of a “digital enterprise”. Businesses get benefited from having more engaged staff, customers, improved loyalty and crowd-source innovation.

Gamification Opportunities in a CRM Environment

Fun, play, challenges and engagement are the key aspects of Gamification. In a CRM environment, there are multiple touch points with customers – all the way from marketing, reaching a wider audience and potential customers to servicing customers after a sale – fostering a gamut of gamification opportunities.

CRM Gamification opportunities can broadly be centered around

Targeting Gamification for Employees

A study shows that less than 30% of workers today are committed to and satisfied with their work. Organizations are compelled to come up with a variety of ways to improve engagement, and create a gamified employee experience.

Increase Sales engagement to build your pipeline

Sales folks are a highly agile, self-motivated group and love competition. However lack of recognition and a less connected field force, can demoralize the team and threaten the central theme – To Sell! Lack of recognition, less connected field force, can demoralize the team and threaten the central theme – To Sell!

Sales Onboarding: Onboarding a salesperson is one of the most difficult and time consuming tasks. It is necessary for the sales team to accurately understand your product as quickly as possible. A flavor of “contest” in your sales application makes the process more fun and the results are great. The team will naturally start asking each other and the leaders what they are doing more efficiently, differently and how? Exploration games like treasure hunts, trivia, etc. increase engagement and the urge to learn about products and team.

Sales Performance: Applications manage your goals, track salespeople’s progress, and help them compare themselves with peers through a scorecard to see who is performing and who needs help in real time. Many applications foster healthy competition within a sales team by providing motivational challenges, contests and other activities. The leader’s statuses can be directly fed into the social applications as posts, making it easy for the team to exchange information, keeping each other posted on their progress and applauding each other for their success.

Increase Services engagement to resolve Customer issues faster

Customer Support Reps and Field Service Executives are usually a bunch of people who are often in the ‘line of fire’ and often need a variety of ways to boost morale and stay motivated; gamification serves to be one unique way.

Case Resolution: Customer service reps and agents are often measured on the number of cases resolved, speed, and satisfaction scores. This provides a wealth of quantitative data in CRM applications around which a gamification program can be built. Managers can provide a lot of meaningful rankings such as that of an agents against colleagues by way of points, challenges completed and various levels. They can include service metrics such as incidents closed, feedback against case records or first-call resolution.

Targeting Gamification for Customers

There are various arenas in the CRM space wherein you can delight customers with Gamification techniques and increase brand loyalty.

Customer Loyalty

Customers today are more demanding than ever. Added to that is the competition prevailing in the market. A few key steps taken in gamifying customer engagement go a long way in increasing customer loyalty, driving sales and growth. You can also utilize the importance of “recognition” to encourage continued participation and competition. Integrate social media into your loyalty program wherever possible and broadcast winners, what they have won, and publish leader boards on your website, etc. Starbucks used gamification tactics to enhance the coffee drinking experience and to boost sales as well. Players registered for ‘My Reward Program’ through an application. Every time they purchase a Starbucks product, they accumulate stars (that look like cups). Benefits include an extra cup of coffee, a birthday gift or even offers designed especially for customer.

Engage via Community

Communities have a common purpose and help discuss and resolve common issues to do with a product or a brand. Determine your segments of audience and their relationships to your brand and form communities that are very relevant. Many companies use game mechanics in a social location-based gaming platform for mobile phone. You can apply gamification within the communities for encouraging interaction amongst the audience by posting questions with rewards to right answers. Instead of passively listening to the community conversation, you can actively drive participation and engagement with community gamification

Marketing Campaigns

Analysts predict, in a few years, gamification in marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon. You can implement digital marketing techniques such as “online hunting games”. Last year when Virgin Mobile Australia launched its integrated brand campaign ‘Game Of Phones’, it challenged players to hunt for almost $200,000 worth of prizes in a virtual world through a mobile app game. It drew almost 40K users into a virtual battle with a total time spent playing, equivalent to five years! Marketers can use memory games, virtual adventure games to create a memorable educational experience.

Industry Adoption Example –Gamified Care Management

Healthcare payers, in an urge, have taken various steps to cut healthcare cover costs. Any step taken towards reducing number of claims is a substantial saving for the provider. Now, one can gamify the whole patient experience, educate about a disease, ways it can be prevented, and motivate them to take care of their health.

• Rewards for each of the step taken for average health improvement such as diet, BMI, etc.
• May also involve specific workout plans and unique games depending on the ailment
• Games involving not just mobile applications but with technologies such as Microsoft Kinect®, Google Glasses®, etc. integrated with cloud apps can not only record and track workouts, but also make the data available anytime, anywhere

Conclusion

Gamification imbibes metrics-oriented behavioral changes in players. Organizations are now more compelled to ride gamification to bring about a radical change in employee, vendor, and customer experience. In the decade to come, several emerging technologies, including gesture control, head-mounted displays and augmented reality will mature. This will further enable the use of gamification in many domains by seamlessly integrating technology into our daily lives. Will Gamification trend? Only time can tell.

References

• Gamification – Org (http://gamification.org/)
• Enterprise Gamification (http://enterprise-gamification.com)
• Gamification Blogger (http://www.gamificationblogger.com/index.php)
• Salesforce.com – Blogs (http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2013/12/gamification-for-sales-onboarding-gp.html)
• Fogg Behavior Model (http://www.behaviormodel.org/)
• Marketing Magazine (http://www.marketingmag.com.au/tags/gamification/#.UwwqhWKSzw0)
• Campaign Brief (http://www.campaignbrief.com/2013/12/virgins-game-of-phones-draws-a.html)