The Gamification Opportunity – Gamifying engagement with your products & services

First off, what is Gamification?

In simple terms, gamification is taking something that is not a game and applying game mechanics to increase user engagement, happiness & loyalty! By “gamifying” an otherwise more standardized experience, customers can be encouraged to interact with the service provider more often and in a more rewarding way. After all, the goal is to entice and engage with the customer!

Gamification can be understood as a value-added layer on top of regular engagement. In many cases it represents new ways for service providers to understand consumers, and thereby collect valuable data and insights about their customer base.

The Aspects of Gamification

By tapping into the emotions of the consumer, gamification’s engagement framework allows service providers to leverage and align customers needs to their own engagement and business goals. Both intrinsic motivations (passion,fun, purpose, self-worth, progress) and extrinsic motivations (status, winning, avoiding failure, rewards, surprises) are touched on by this approach.

The documented effectiveness of gamification is unsurprising. A recent survey of 55k consumers expressed a broad interest in game mechanics while 81% had already played one game or another.

There is a 1.7x increase in enjoyment when game mechanics are used in a consumer experience program. Well over 80% of the under-30s market prefer to engage this way. Today mobile games account for 33% of all app downloads, 74% of consumer spend and 10% of all time spent in-app.

Visual challenges with badges

Orange Belgium wanted to use its “Thank You Loyalty Program” to enhance interaction with its customers. Gamifying their experiences through badges was deployed to:

• Recognize specific actions through digital badges
• Unlock rewards by earning badges
• Create an open-ended program with unlimited options to create new badges
• Surprise & delight program in parallel for non-digital audience 

Results:

• 50% increase in Base Redemption Rate
• Upshift to Number 1 in NPS in the Belgian market
• Campaign Open Rates of 60%+
• 19% average conversion rate
• 100% increase in digital(app) channel usage

A game layer on a points program

Ooredoo Myanmar set up its VIP Program to offer points-based earn and burn in a tiered loyalty program delivered via an app for its prepaid customer base. This will establish new and consistent best practices including:

• Combination of CVM & Loyalty with practice campaigns and loyalty offers
• Gamification and contests for higher engagement and point redemption
• Mix of telecom, partner and experiential (jackpot) rewards
• Successful deployments of top-up + Richardson & win, supported by ATL 

Results:

• 1 Million+ registrations in 6 months
• 150K games/day played
• 21% conversion
• VIP drove My Ooredoo App Regis from 350K to 1.4M
• 80% engagement rate
• ARPU uplift & churn reduction of 30% and 50% respectively in the registered user base

Gamifying the bundle purchase process

Another MNO in SE Asia embedded a gamification layer in its existing points program using Evolving’s technology

• Targeted registered points customers
• Offer a skill game (based on candy crush)
• Encourage spending via points to play
• Define KPIs from increased app engagement and drive top-up revenue 

Results:

• 70% repeat play rate
• Reduction of balance sheet risk without sacrificing customer repeatability