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Who doesn’t like to win?
Everybody does! The thrill and enthusiastic spirit within us force us to face challenges and overtake competitions to chase victory. And when the challenge comes with a reward, the victory becomes even sweeter.
In this business world, you must let your customers win to earn their satisfaction. But letting your customers win does not mean that you should lose. This article will walk you through the various aspects of CRM gamification and reveal some top cheat codes for achieving a win-win game.
What is Gamification in CRM?
Gamification is the inclusion of game elements such as scores, points, badges, rewards, and challenges into a non-game environment, like an office or a workplace. CRM gamification is simply making the customer relationship management process into a fun game by adding such game elements to increase customer engagement and sales.
For instance,
Issuing badges to customers for achieving different milestones with your business, such as making their first purchase, being a frequent visitor, or being a premium customer.
How Does Gamification Improve Customer Engagement?
Search engines like Google Chrome have made even the user waiting time exciting by allowing the users to play mini-games at times of network issues. This encourages the users to engage themselves without frustration during downtime and also retains them until the network issues are resolved.
Let’s be honest. Many of us look forward to those games or even play them when we have network access, right? That’s the impact of the gamification strategy those companies have implemented.
CRM gamification can boost customer engagement to greater levels. Besides being entertaining, it also increases customer participation when valuable rewards are promised in return such as offering them a free service for referring their business to many.
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CRM Gamification Strategies
Take a look at these simple yet effective strategies that can be used for CRM gamification for businesses.
Leaderboards
Leaderboards display the list of top performers in the system. It can be used to promote healthy competition among the users, encouraging them to climb up the ranks in the leaderboard.
Duolingo, a language learning app uses leaderboards to encourage its users’ learning progress.
Badges
Badges may represent achievements or a community. In games, these are generally associated with skills or experience level. This concept can also be used in your website to improve the competitiveness and enthusiasm of your customers. It is also a fun way for customers to interact with the community as they can collect, share, and show off their hard-earned badges with other people of similar interests.
Fitbit, a fitness application provides badges for accomplishing certain fitness goals. For example, this image displays a badge that can be earned by climbing 800 floors.
Loyal Points System/Reward System
Another gamification strategy is the loyal points system or the reward system in which loyalty points (XP) are offered to customers for engaging with the brand. These points can be accumulated and redeemed for special discounts, exclusive products, and offers.
The Beauty Insider program of Sephora allows customers to earn points on their purchases and redeem them later for offers and discounts.
Progress Bars
Progress bars indicate how far the user is from the completion of a task. It is commonly used in games for displaying loading times. This element creates a sense of eagerness to complete a process, as most people prefer to see a process through, rather than leave it hanging or unfinished. Progress bars can be used for customer onboarding, profile completion, reading blogs, and other sequential processes on your website.
A well-known example of progress bars is Amazon’s order tracking, which keeps customers engaged during their wait reducing their frustration and increasing their anticipation for their product’s arrival.
Virtual Currencies
Virtual currencies are in-app digital coins or currencies that can only be used within the app.
These are commonly used by eCommerce websites and applications to promote in-app purchases. The logic behind virtual currencies is simple – spend what you earn, and in doing so, you earn more to spend again. This cycle encourages repeat purchases.
Starbucks offers stars as their virtual currency that can be earned through purchasing their products. These stars can be redeemed for free drinks, food, etc.
Challenges and Missions
Businesses set missions or challenges to enrich social participation in certain goals or tasks such as trying out their new products, leaving reviews, maintaining streaks, etc. to achieve rewards and prizes.
Nike Run Club hosts many fitness challenges and community-based missions to promote its brand and customer engagement. It also allows users to share challenges among themselves, which motivates their app usage.
Mystery Rewards
Sometimes you can just surprise your customers with mystery rewards. You can automate your CRM to offer surprise rewards to customers through email or pop-ups in the app based on their activity.
Google Pay offers mystery scratch card rewards upon completion of transactions. The little visuals employed by the app to scratch and reveal the reward, create a sense of joy and curiosity among customers.
Referral Programs
Referral programs create opportunities for businesses to step up customer acquisition while bolstering customer retention. Gamifying referral programs makes them more interesting. You can share a referral code with your customers through which their friends and connections can sign in to your product. When a new customer joins through a referral code, you must reward both the referrer and the referee. This engages the customers to refer your products actively to many.
Dropbox offers extra storage for both the referrer and the referee when the referee creates a new account through the referral link.
Cheat Codes For Gamification Success
Now, let’s talk about some cheat codes to help you make the best out of gamification.
Here are some crucial tips to help you successfully implement CRM gamification in your business:
- Personalize rewards
If a reward holds no value to a customer, it will result in reduced motivation and lower participation as customers tend to engage themselves when the rewards are based on their interests and needs. Businesses should think in customers’ shoes and understand what rewards to offer to increase customer engagement rather than offering rewards just for the sake of it.
- Instant gratification
Don’t make your customers wait too long for their rewards. Quick gratification cheers up the users and keeps them coming back for more achievements and rewards. Long and delayed goals are tiresome as users often get discouraged during the long wait and slow progress. Appreciating even their smallest achievements is an excellent tip to improve customer engagement.
- Expiring prizes
Another tip while implementing CRM gamification is to keep time limits on the prizes. This creates a fear of missing out (FOMO) among the users, spurring their involvement. Non-expiring prizes get easily forgotten and lack urgency. That’s why many brands offer coupons and privileges with a time limit.
- Invest in good designs
Investing in a good interface design is essential to provide a superior user experience. Though you offer fascinating rewards, a poor game design will terribly affect the users’ engagement. Discover what type of gamification will interest your target customers and implement those features for better user engagement.
- Measure and upgrade
Gamification-integrated CRMs can track and monitor user engagement after the implementation of the game elements into your application or website. User activity data can be recorded in your CRM automatically through which you can gain valuable insights into customer preferences and trends. When you constantly measure and update your strategies based on that data, you can ensure increased customer engagement and business performance.
CRM Gamification Platforms
Here’s a list of the top 3 gamification platforms that can be integrated into your CRM.
- Bunchball Nitro
Bunchball Nitro is a cloud-based gamification software that can be easily integrated into any CRM, LMS, intranet, etc. It supports game techniques like leaderboards, missions, points, and badges.
- Gametize
Gametize is best for gamifying community engagement by allowing businesses to design their own game from scratch, customize challenges, and track user activity through analytics while customers can be kept entertained through points, rewards, feedback messages, and communicating their performance with their social network.
- Mambo.io
Mambo.io is specially designed to build in-app gamification for enterprises. It provides a flexible API for developers to achieve customization. E-commerce stores that integrate gamification using mambo.io can easily track their user purchases made through coupons, generated by their customer engagement programs.
Wrapping Up
As mentioned earlier, implementing gamification in CRM is a win-win game as your customers can be entertained and engaged, and in return, your business instills a long-lasting impression in your customers’ minds making them stay loyal to your business.
Finally, it’s all about how you make your customers feel that helps them remember you. So enhance their experience and start scoring “joy points” from your customers by adding the above fun elements to your CRM today!
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