Using Gamification to Improve Customer Engagement

According to a survey conducted by Convero, 58% companies did not have a formal customer engagement program in place, and 60% didn’t know how many customers they had lost over the past year.Here are some common challenges associated with customer engagement:

Distraction
With the competition vying for your customers’ attention, a major challenge for any engagement program is to cut through the domain of distractions and differentiate yourself.

Expectations
Easy access to a plethora of products, services, or platforms has increased the expectations of customers. If your engagement strategy doesn’t interest customers, they won’t hesitate to move to the next provider.

Connection
Acquiring new customers is only one part of the game. It is crucial to find new and innovative ways to have a continuous connect with your customers.

Over time, business strategists have discovered various innovative ways to combat distraction and keep customers engaged. One such way is through an online customer community. A web-based platform where customers can discuss product/service related problems, post reviews, and brainstorm new product/service ideas has proved to be an efficient way of achieving customer engagement.

How gamification can be leveraged to increase customer engagement?

It is tricky to grow and keep your customers engaged on a customer community. However, gamification can play a key role in keeping your community members motivated and engaged.
Gamification is the craft of applying game mechanics to non-gaming environments to engage and motivate participants. Challenges and rewards are introduced to drive participation from members.
Let’s take a look at how you can leverage gamification to increase engagement in your customer community.

Drive user engagement
Gamification turns the entire community experience into a competition. Customers that move up the competition levels get rewarded for their contributions. These contributions can be in the form of initiating a discussion, posting product reviews, replying to queries and more.

Promote brand loyalty
Giving a sense of reputation to customers through points, badges, and leaderboards turns them into advocates of your brand. Offering discounts and free merchandise for a certain action such as posting a positive review makes customers feel valued, increasing their loyalty towards your brand.

Generate user data
With every piece of information posted or shared in your community, you get customer data which can be highly valuable for your brand. Though there are many processes to collect customer information, gamification generates more accurate results. Analytics on this collected data can drive your marketing campaigns towards a better performance. This can be done by analyzing their community participation like number of discussions initiated, replies posted, shared content and more.

Augment lead scoring
In certain cases, gamification provides an opportunity to track the activities of leads engaged in your community and evaluate the scope of turning them into customers. By assigning values to different user interactions, you can plan your customer acquisition actions better.

Increase brand awareness
The rewarded customers tend to share their achievements on social media. This sharing on different social media platforms increases your brand awareness among potential customers and bypasses the need to devise time-consuming and costly methods of tapping customers.

If done correctly, gamification raises the interactivity bar in your customer community, aligning customer behavior with your organization’s objectives. As customer attention continues to grow, customer engagement is achieved and this engagement is what makes all the difference to achieve your desired goals.
To know more about gamification in online communities, read our blogs:
Gamification in partner communities and Gamification in employee communities.

Want to leverage gamification in your customer community? Let’s discuss.

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