Engagement

Gamification in business is a great customer engagement strategy used by Exponential Organizations to attract and retain customers.

The Benefits of Gamification for Customer Engagement

Exponential Organizations use gamification for customer engagement to attract customers, improve retention rates and lower customer acquisition costs.

Customer engagement is one of the most pivotal components of building a successful business. To ensure that your customers keep choosing you over your competition, you need to keep them engaged.

Brands can’t just rely on catchy slogans or celebrity endorsements anymore. Thanks to the rapid development of the digital world, brands need to be ready to take on opportunities to engage with customers anywhere, anytime. Gamification in business is a crucial customer engagement strategy that Exponential Organizations (ExOs) are using to build stronger relationships with their customers.

Here’s how ExOs are using gamification for customer engagement.

Why is engagement so important for Exponential Organizations?

Engagement is one of the 11 attributes of an ExO. It uses techniques such as reputation systems, gamification, loyalty programs and incentive prizes to keep these groups interested, involved and increasingly committed to your shared purpose.

In an ExO, engagement serves four main benefits.

1. It keeps your current customers happy and connected by reminding them why they chose your product or service over another. It also acts as a continuous reminder of the value you are providing them while increasing long-term loyalty among your customers.

2. It helps you convert the crowd into your community. This is achieved by creating a mechanism where the crowd finds out about your product or service or when your current community engages their friends and families, encouraging them to join in.

3. Engaged community members add value to your product or service by providing feedback and data to help drive development and improvement. ExOs can also reap the benefits of co-creation with their customers along with amplified ideation. By inviting customers to contribute to your business, you appeal to their desire to take purposeful action.

4. Gamification can be used in marketing by providing dynamic solutions that can integrate into your various marketing campaigns to make the user’s experience with your brand more exciting.

Gamification can transform a brand from one that customers like to one they feel genuinely connects with them. A solid brand-customer connection is indispensable to ExOs.

How does gamification for customer engagement work?

The more your brand represents a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP), the easier engagement becomes. If that sounds tough, there are lots of exponential strategies you can use to boost client engagement, and they don’t have to be complicated. Instead, they must come from an authentic place, target the right audiences, and provide compelling reasons for customers to engage, so they’ll genuinely want to.

Gamification does this by optimizing the customer experience and making an activity more rewarding and fun to participate in. Gamifying provides a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators that encourage or push customers to become more engaged with the brand.

Simply put: gamification increases customer engagement by offering them unique and fun ways to interact with brands.

When incorporating gamification in your customer engagement strategy, you need to ensure that it includes the below key attributes:

• Ranking transparency: Allow users to be able to compare themselves to others
• Self-efficacy: Give people a sense of control and agency
• Peer pressure: Encourage peer pressure in the form of social comparison
• Eliciting positive emotions to drive long-term behavioral change: Offer rewards in the form of badges, points or rankings
• Instant feedback: If customers miss out on something, provide a quick response to encourage them to improve their rank, get more points or move to the next level by doing x
• Clear, authentic rules, goals and rewards: Make it easy for customers to understand how to navigate the customer engagement platform
• Reward mechanism: Offer virtual currencies or points

The challenges of gamification for customer engagement

While there are many benefits of incorporating gamification into your customer engagement strategy, it does come with its challenges.

Firstly, it requires highly specialized resources to implement properly. If not implemented correctly, it can attract the wrong community or quickly lose sight of the main goal of the gamification platform. 

Another challenge comes from needing to interact with diverse community members who come from different backgrounds and experiences, and all have very different expectations. To overcome this challenge, you need to be very clear about what you are trying to incentivize and how it works.

Thirdly, finding the balance between positive and negative incentives can be tricky. The winning formula will generally include more positive incentives than negative ones.

Lastly comes the challenge of continually evolving your gamification strategy. Many incentive programs decay over time, and customers lose interest. You need to find a way to maintain interest and engagement levels.

Engagement is the ExO attribute that is continually evolving

How you can engage with your customers is continually evolving. New technologies are constantly being introduced that only enhance these strategies. With Web3, crypto, and NFTs, customer engagement becomes even more powerful. Exponential Organizations are the ones at the forefront of revolutionizing the customer experience by evolving with current technology and the engagement opportunities that come with it.

To learn more about the other attributes, click here.

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