Motivation is crucial for everyone. What motivates an employee at work? What motivates a contributor? What motivates a client? What motivates a customer? The answer to all these questions are straightforward and similar – a sense of competition, rewards, and recognition are the main motivators. So, why motivate? Be it your customers or clients or employees, the result is same i.e. motivation directly leads to increase in the production. Gamification is a myth that helps motivate you clients, customer or even your employees.
Gamification taps into each of the motivators that keep your people engaged. It is a concept of involving the game mechanics along with the game design techniques in an already existing system like applications and website. This concept helps engage and motivate your people to achieve their tasks and goals. In simple words, Gamification is applying game mechanism and principles to non-game contexts. Many studies proved that Gamification had brought a positive impact on individuals.
The history dates back to 2002 when Nick Peeling, a British-born computer programmer, and inventor coined the name “Gamification.” Unfortunately, it didn’t gain attention until 2010 and only on 2010, Gamification first won its usage as it was referred as incorporating the rewards programs of games into the existing system. Since then, the gamification concept got its attention, and many started deploying it and gained a lot.
The term Gamification is around for some time, and it started gaining its position in top enterprises and also in some mid-level companies but, the concept of using game tactics is not new to us. For example, we have been using the credit cards that offers reward points for every transaction. The same concept is what modernized as Gamification. It has many potentials but many companies are not either into gamification, or they might have failed after gamifying. The hesitation is because they couldn’t see the expected after gamifying their website or application. Many are waiting for the success of the Fortune 1000 companies as they can mimic the successful company’s story.
As said earlier, the Gamification is the concept that has a huge potential of bringing the profitable return on investment (ROI). There are many reasons why your company should adopt for gamification, but here are top five points for you to shift your gears to speed up the gamification concept
Gamification platforms are mostly initiated with login credentials i.e. platforms require the users to log in with a valid email ID or social media accounts. The organization will be able to gather important and powerful data about the user which helps to track the user activity in the system. Not only this, the users will be associated with badges, rewards, clicks, etc. which are sure to generate a big data that might be useful for business improvement. Mike Hugos, author of “Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better Business” and gamification expert said, “This is the real-time feedback world we live in.”
Gamification is one of the creative ways to help your customer know about new product or service that is about the be launched. Similar to how a game works, you can educate your customer to learn about your product with the help of game mechanics. An analyst from Forrester Reseach, Jennifer Wise said, “It’s providing the achievement that’s connected to motivation.” Gamification concept can also be applied to help your employees get educated through motivational lessons.
Companies are not only benefiting from the customers using the gamification concept. They also give back to the communities connected to their business and sometimes industry. RecycleBank, a famous recycling company, give attractive discounts and gift cards to its customer for being green by recycling and using less energy.
Crowdsourcing is becoming popular with enterprises and many medium and small level companies. Another advantage of having login and data collection on the website is that the collected data can be used as a sounding board. Gamification can be an added benefit to crowdsourcing if companies start using the feedback received from the customer through games and apply the same to try solving the critical problems. Hugos also said, “the notion that any company can be innovative through their internal R&D efforts is an obsolete notion.”
Gamification not only helps the business improve the activities but also helps remind the customers that the business is still existing and engaged with them. Hugos said, “It’s very easy to gamify when it’s a social environment or when you have a lot of content to keep the engagement fresh.” The game concepts help the customer stay engages with their favorite companies.
Gamification offers making boring tasks, like filling reports, more like playing a game. Many companies of major industry have started using the concept to helps learn and reach heights. Web design and development companies are targeting more on the concept of gamification as it is getting the hotspot in helping businesses get the perfect reach and potential sales.