5 Ways to Implement Gamification for Ultimate Engagement

Gamification is the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. When it comes to your brand, gamification strategy marketing can be a great tool to help achieve your businesses’ objectives. Externally, gamification can be used to increase engagement with customers, collect customer data, raise awareness of your brand and develop your brand’s unique voice and identity.

It is also an excellent way to engage employees, aid them in mastering important skills and increase their innovation, creativity and work satisfaction. With all the success gamification has seen in improving employee’s morale and productivity, it’s a must-have in your work environment.

There are numerous functions gamification of implementation in today’s work environment. In this blog, we provide you with the top five most effective uses.

1. Recruiting employees through games on social media

With the aid of gamification, your company’s recruitment will become a more exciting and engaging process for your potential hires. One example of a way gamification has been used in recruitment is by Marriott. The successful international hotel chain released a Facebook game for their potential hospitality industry hires. The “MyMarriottHotel” game gave players the opportunity to act as hospitality managers. It then took the gamers to Marriott’s careers page, with the goal to fill 50,000 empty positions.

2. Employee training and onboarding

Your company can integrate gamification into the training process by using trivia to quiz employees on training, creating a computer game for employees to go through common scenarios or through a roleplay. Another way to incorporate gamification is through the use of a leaderboard that can show how each employee is progressing with training and how they compare to others.

Multiple companies have added gamification to their training process, notably, Deloitte has done an excellent job doing so. Upon adding gamification to their leadership academy (an online training program for Deloitte employees), they saw a 37% increase in returning users per week. With the use of add-ins such as missions, badges and a leaderboard, employees became more engaged in training. There are even “secret” or snowflake badges which are unlocked when a user meets a goal that is unpredictable, giving employees a surprise element to keep them entertained.

3. Utilizing games to improve customer service

In the customer service department, gamification can improve in key performance indicators. Omnicare is an example of a company that was not doing particularly well at their customer help desk as their customers often saw long wait times, prior to their gamification. Setting up goals for their customer representatives, Omnicare created tasks such as, “find three customers who have a problem with billing,” with the objective to present them with recognition rewards. To the surprise of the company, customers’ waiting times were split in half.

4. Team motivation and recognition through gamification

Gamification is also an excellent way to provide feedback in a fun and engaging way to employees. Target decided a great way to engage their cashiers and provide real-time feedback was through the use of gamification. When checking people out, cashiers see a red or green color depending on whether the item was scanned in the optimal time. Afterwards, they see their score for real-time feedback. This way, Target was able to provide positive feedback to their employees and employees can constantly check if they are meeting the optimal scanning times.

There are other ways to implement gamification into your work environment to provide real-time feedback to employees. As you have seen, the use of leaderboards allow employees to see how they compare on a certain goal to other employees and understand where they need to improve or if they are meeting or exceeding the necessary metric. When an employee does their job well , they can be rewarded with prizes as well as receiving encouragement and game feedback.

Professional marketing agencies can assist with identifying and planning ways to recognize employees through recognition rewards such as special highlights on social media.

5. Educating through interactive engagement

Gamification can be an excellent way to build community and culture through learning. For example, our team partnered with Dr. Phillips Charities to integrate an engaging game at UCF’s new Downtown Orlando campus. In the Dr. Phillip’s academic Commons area, we created an innovative, interactive touchscreen experience for students to learn about Dr. Phillips’ history and latest endeavors, take a selfie with the man himself and stay up-to-date on current UCF events. One particularly unique feature was the “Are you an Entrepreneur?” game where students can take a short quiz to find out what type of entrepreneur, philanthropist or philanpreneur they are — all while learning facts about the Dr. Phillips’ legacy. This helped increase student engagement at UCF’s downtown campus.

Analyzing engagement for better results

Setting up good analytics for your game can provide you with valuable information about your audience and the results. For example, you can look at the number of users engaged in the past week, popular vs unpopular challenges and changes in behavior from those who have participated in gamification. Obtaining detailed information about the journey and results can show how they align with your goals.

With implementing the gamification activity also comes the importance of promoting it. Professional marketing agencies can assist in spreading the word of new games and features to help the business achieve its gamification goals, whether it’s raising awareness of the brand or increasing engagement with customers. Agencies understand the right mediums to promote it and how to develop an effective marketing campaign through tools such as social media and email marketing.

Get started into incorporating gamification into your company’s employee functions today with the assistance of a professional marketing agency. Appleton is an award-winning, full-service Orlando advertising agency that works with local, national and international clients to deliver impressive ad campaigns, branding, print, web, public relations, social media and video services — all in-house. At Appleton, we want to learn about your business, empower your marketing team and be your creative resource. Your advertising goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com.

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