Research and analytics
Gamification has the ability to spice up customer engagement in areas that have traditionally failed to attract the target market, such as in market research and other fields of data collection. While the internet has given market researchers a wide pool of potential candidates from which to quickly and easily obtain data, poorly-designed online surveys can make customer engagement lower and therefore, less reliable.
As a result, this has 'major implications for data quality with a knock-on effect on the quality of the insights received', according to Engage Research, which recently wrote about its foray into gamification.
Trialling a number of well-documented gamification practices, the organisation found it received 'two or even three times as much feedback to the more engaging questions and consistently more time taken in providing the answers'.
When Engage simply asked customers to describe themselves, for example, an average of 85 per cent of people answered using an average of 2.4 descriptors. When asked to describe themselves in seven words however, response rates rose to 98 per cent and descriptors increased to 4.5.
In a business context, getting the maximum amount of information out of a 20,000-strong workforce could make the difference between adopting a new company-wide policy or not. Only by ensuring the correct level of engagement and detail can businesses truly make the right decisions for all their staff.
Illustrating the importance of rewards to individuals, Engage also discovered that a question like "What emotions do you think people associate with this?" generated response times of eight seconds, with a 50 per cent 'enjoyment rate'. When respondents were told they'd receive points for correct answers, this rose to a 12-second completion time with a 90 per cent enjoyment rate.
The results illustrate perfectly how gamification techniques can provoke people not only to be more engaged with the topic at hand - increasing their chances giving well thought-out, qualitative answers - but providing more information generally about a specific topic.
Increased performance
Considering the dramatic impact of gamification on staff engagement levels, it's easy to imagine how gamification could be applied within the workplace - in areas such as employee performance management, training and innovation.
Just like using gamification in a survey, it could be used as part of a task-based project to increase friendly competition among workers. While the rules of gaming will always dictate that one person is 'better' than another (perhaps having more points on a sales leader board, for example) the feeling that staff are contributing and adding value towards something might be a powerful enough emotion for them to continue doing so.
"[Users] create value. This is what you want to drive," explains Michael Wu, a principal scientist in analytics at brand advocacy firm, Lithium, as cited by computing.co.uk.
Wu argues that when employees realise how much value they've created, in terms of connecting with one another and raising important business issues, "gamification becomes secondary, and value becomes primary".
Ultimately, gamification opportunities could help employees become more productive and help them to enhance existing business processes.
LiveOps, a call-centre vendor with 20,000 independent call-centre contractors throughout the United States, says its gamification platform has led to a 15 per cent reduction in call times. Furthermore, its sales have improved between eight and 12 per cent among some sales agents.
Over half of the company's agents (60 per cent) voluntarily check-in to the community site, with 90 per cent logging on weekly to compete in new challenges and review their personal performance.
Overall, the company claims it has increased revenue by two per cent, due to implementing a gamified platform.
Dangers
In a recent report, 'The Engagement Economy: How gamification is reshaping businesses', Deloitte warned that businesses need to be careful about how they source and utilise data collected from their gamification-based endeavours.
While the fun factor surrounding gamification most certainly exists, it's important that businesses 'agree to terms on standards for sharing data, while maintaining strict data privacy and security standards,' just as they would with any other sort of user data collection; perhaps keeping it stored in a data centre.
Furthermore, for gamification to be sustainable, it must constantly evolve, as (just like a real game) users will inevitably hit a wall of progression: the maximum level of user points, for example.
"Gamification by itself is not sustainable in the long term," said Wu of the matter. "Once you master a game, you finish all the levels, you quit. You move onto the next game. Nobody plays a game for their whole life."
One answer to keeping people 'in the game' could be to constantly push the maximum attainable levels available to users, driving them to 'play' indefinitely.
By continuing to engage customers and staff, businesses will continue to reap all of the benefits that gamification has to offer. For those yet to have applied gamification to their businesses, the hard figures put forward in this article might provide enough encouragement to warrant a 'play' themselves.
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By: Dominic Monkhouse
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