Imagine a scenario where you visit an apparel store. Even before you enter into the change room to try your favorite clothing, how would you feel if a video footage of a model wearing the same garment in your hand is played through the RFID microchip tagged to the garment?
The recent years have seen the rapid expansion of the gamification market. The principal of applying game mechanics to non-game experiences or rewarding people with incentives is not new. But the influence of this approach has grown with the convergence of social media, mobile technology, big data, and wearable technology. A recent Markets and Markets survey estimates that the gamification market will grow from $421.3 million in 2013 to $5.502 billion in 2018—that’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 67.1% over six years.
While gamification has already seen successful integration into organizations’ employee engagement strategies, the future could see this translate to enterprise software suites where business goals are depicted as ‘missions’, with points and badges to be earned. Here, game mechanics is applied to incentivize, measure, and motivate employee performance.
Now, corporations are also increasingly taking gamification outside the organization to engage their customers. While the largest adopter of gamification solutions is expected to be the ‘consumer goods and retail’ sector, some of the best examples of the use of gamification are currently emerging from the banking sector. For instance, the Spanish bank BBVA released the BBVA game last year to improve customer retention and the online customer experience. The award-winning game uses a mix of incentives and friendly competition to further these objectives. Interestingly, banks are also finding that gamification is an extremely handy tool to reach a youthful audience, who is typically disengaged from the more formal and traditional banking sector. Think about the benefit of a financial literacy tool for children, which takes them through life scenarios that could impact their finances, while rewarding them for reading articles on financial literacy. Imagine the impact of a similar learning game for adults, which simulates the purchase and ownership of a property or transacting over an online stock exchange.
Even in the media industry, there is an increasing interest in a gamified news experience. Practitioners here recognize that gamification could change the way that news is consumed, with the audience emerging as participators in the creation process. Retailers too are gamifying their operations in order to attract and engage shoppers.
But the impact of gamification does not end with customer engagement, and could spill over into the methods that companies use to analyze customer data. Game elements can be used to gather additional user details, with rewards for user participation, giving corporations deeper customer insights.
Yet the path towards gamification needs to be trodden with care. Any gamification strategy must be driven by focused business objectives. Gartner estimates that 80 percent of gamified apps will fail due to poor design and failure to meet business objectives. Clearly, gamification cannot be pursued as an end in itself. Companies who avoid this pitfall have the tools for a winning employee and customer engagement strategy at hand.
Do you think that gamification will transform the ways that corporations engage with their employees and customers? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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