Gamification, a process of implementing gaming strategies and tactics to boost up productivity through a sense of competition, has become a norm in different forms of business due to its proven success methodology. This strategy is not entirely new because both bank cards and the airline industry has been implementing this process under the banner rewards system for its customers. While most companies have implemented this strategy successfully or in some cases mimicked accomplished corporates to avoid going through a trial process to check its success rate, gamification as a process has quite a lot to offer than just instilling a sense of competition among the employees.
Some of these benefits are:
- Creates a free portal for studying customer trends: Most end users of a product have online benefits where they sign up using an email id or social media credential to access different online platforms. The data entered by the customer generates the collection of all information given as well as helps monitor a customer’s trends, purchases, etc. This data generated can be helpful for companies to pick out essential stats to study and efficiently implement the same in their own businesses for further improvement of ROI.
- Helps solve complex problems: Every business undergoes multiple problems that need resolving on a day to day basis. By encouraging its users to provide feedback at different intervals of time helps a business to crowd-source feedback and use it to strategize and solve complex business problems that may otherwise end up as bugs and deter the success of any business. This process also enables users to feel benefitted in earning points to unlock features or move on to other levels. This satisfaction ensures that the customer presents an accurate feedback and helps eliminate any other element that is irrelevant. The tool of analytics plays a major role in sourcing out the best data using the process of gamification.
- Testing the market: When bringing in new products, companies can pick out its target customers with all the data collected and present their trial run with such customers to gain feedback for developing the new product or addressing any glitches that may have gone unnoticed during R&D. Essentially anything that is free of cost loses value in the market way too quickly. So having incentives for the users of trial programs helps get better inputs for business generation and also allows for a wide spectrum of analysis into understanding their customers’ needs better.
While these points listed are business oriented, gamification has proved to be successful in the educational sector as well. Through the process of education teachers instrument credit systems to engage the current “tech savvy” generation to be interested in a wide foray of topics beyond the curriculum.
The art of gamification has proved to be an excellent tool in the online marketing of a product or a service.
