Editorial
The Gist
- Gamification drives customer loyalty. Gamified experiences create deeper engagement, turning customers into loyal brand advocates.
- AI-enhanced gamification. AI-powered gamification adapts to customer behaviors in real-time, delivering personalized and impactful experiences.
- Gamification boosts event engagement. Incorporating game mechanics in events doubles attendee engagement and strengthens connections with your brand.
You may not have realized this, but we’ve all experienced gamified customer experiences. Whether you log in daily to Duolingo to keep your language learning streak going, use an app to earn points and badges for using your phone less, or join teams to earn badges and compete in fitness challenges, you’re experiencing gamification — and how it can change your behavior.
Internationally, 70% of global 2000 companies use gamification in some way. Regardless of your industry, gamification can transform your customer experience by transforming customer communities, customer advocacy, and even your events. Let’s dive into how and why gamification matters in CX.
Why Does Gamification Matter, Anyway?
To boil it down to its essentials, gamification is the application of game design elements to engage and motivate users to change their behaviors — just outside of gaming contexts.
When you’re playing a game, the feedback or results are immediate and measurable because you either win or you lose. However, in a game when you lose it is not as final as if you fail your driving exam. If you lose (die) a boss fight in a game you can try again with different and adapted strategies thanks to immediate feedback. You get in-depth feedback on how you’re performing compared to your past performance and to others, and there are clear starting and ending points.
This encourages people to attempt things they may have otherwise avoided out of fear of failure and it also encourages people to “get back on the horse” if they don’t succeed the first time around. This approach helps to subtly shift people's behavior to the benefit of all involved.
Other game mechanics such as points, achievement badges and milestones help to show where you are relative to others which can intrinsically motivate many people to continue to engage, compete, and return.
"Organizations should use gamification to empower their customers, employees and communities to reach their goals," says Brian Burke, author of Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary, and research vice president at Gartner. “Gamification is about motivating people to achieve their own goals, not the organization's goals.”
Historically companies have incorporated gamification features such as points, badges, leaderboards and rewards into customer experiences, to enhance user participation, foster learning and drive engagement with success.
However, gamification has recently received an upgrade thanks to AI-fueled predictive modeling and proactive interventions. AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of customer data in real-time, enabling gamified systems to adapt dynamically to individual preferences, behavior patterns and performance metrics — ultimately enabling brands to deliver consistently exceptional customer experiences across various touchpoints and channels.
Related Article: How Gamification Improves Customer Enthusiasm & Brand Engagement
Powering Customer Communities Through Gamification
According to HubSpot’s State of Consumer Trends Report, 24% of social media users have actively participated in an online community in the last three months. To keep that number rising, consider using gamification techniques to not only enhance the customer experience but also drive long-term loyalty and advocacy.
Measurable achievements are particularly important for customer communities because participants aren’t just motivated by helping others. Some are, but others want to earn free prizes or swag, while another group wants to showcase their knowledge by earning status points or experience points, gems, avatar upgrades and badges. Building a community that takes all these personas into account is one way to keep your community vibrant and growing.
Gamification is a powerful catalyst for building vibrant customer communities, ensuring that customers feel connected to each other — and to the brand — by:
- Fostering a sense of belonging. Whether it's through collaborative quests, team-based challenges or the creation of guilds, gamified experiences encourage users to interact with each other, share knowledge, and support one another.
- Encouraging user-generated content and social interaction. Discussion forums, user-generated challenges and sharing achievements on social media platforms enable customers to exchange ideas and connect with other community members.
- Motivating members to strive for recognition. Recognition including leaderboards, competitions, badges and virtual rewards serves as a powerful motivator for continued engagement and participation, driving a cycle of positive reinforcement.
Customer communities give your customers a forum to freely share thoughts, feedback and questions about your products. Whether it’s a Facebook group, a dedicated community platform, a Slack channel or even a public Discord server, your customer community is one of the most valuable ways to engage your customers. In fact, 66% of customers who belong to a brand community say they’re loyal to that brand.
Leveraging Gamification for Customer Advocacy
According to a study by Demand Gen Report, 97% of B2B buyers believe that user-generated content, such as peer reviews and user forums, are more credible than other types of content. That’s awesome for customer experience professionals, at least until you have to create all that content. And that’s where customer advocacy — a structured approach to building and nurturing relationships with loyal customers — comes in.
Customer advocacy, also known as marketing advocacy or referral marketing, is used for customer referrals, account-based marketing and amplifying brand reach and credibility. It transforms how organizations approach customer service, support, CX, customer marketing, sales and even executive decisions about the strategy and vision of the company.
The goal of this customer-centricity? To convert happy customers into loyal advocates who will share your brand through word-of-mouth and expand your brand recognition — and your reputation.
Integrating gamified elements into your customer advocacy program can help incentivize customers to become enthusiastic advocates for your brand by:
- Encouraging user-generated reviews, testimonials, and referrals. According to a study by Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. Gamification rewards user-generated content, such as reviews, testimonials, and social media posts — meaning you end up with more organic promotion that carries significant weight with potential customers.
- Turning customers into brand advocates through gamified experiences. By offering incentives such as points, badges, or exclusive rewards for advocacy actions like referrals or sharing branded content, gamification can transform advocacy efforts into a fun and rewarding experience for customers.
- Amplifying brand reach and credibility through advocacy marketing campaigns. Engaging advocates helps your brand amplify the voices of people who are passionate about championing your values. Whether advocates sharing their own content on social media or are actively referring colleagues, you will likely reach potential customers you wouldn’t have otherwise.
In this case, gamification serves as a catalyst for driving customer advocacy, fosters a sense of community among advocates, and makes advocacy efforts engaging and rewarding. By leveraging gamification effectively, businesses can harness the power of their most enthusiastic customers to fuel organic growth and brand advocacy.
Using Gamification to Drive Engagement in Customer Events
Why use gamification in your customer events? Well, for starters, it can help turn dull work events into engaging adventures that leave attendees buzzing about your brand. According to a study by EventMB, events that incorporate gamification experience a 100% increase in attendee engagement compared to traditional events. Why? It taps into the human desire for competition, achievement and fun.
Gamification boosts attendee engagement, creates memorable experiences and strengthens connections with attendees and your brand and among attendees by:
- Motivating attendees to actively participate. According to Gartner research, gamified activities can increase participant engagement by up to 50% at customer events. Game mechanics such as challenges, quests or competitions create a sense of competition, driving higher levels of engagement and interaction.
- Enhancing networking opportunities. Structured activities like icebreaker games, scavenger hunts or collaborative challenges, gamification encourage attendees to break the ice and forge new relationships, while extending gamified activities like photo contests or trivia quizzes to social media extends the reach of your event far beyond the attendees physically in the room.
- Fostering learning. Incorporating educational elements into the event experience through interactive workshops, quizzes or simulations makes content delivery more engaging and memorable. In fact, TalentLMS found that gamification can improve learning engagement up to 60% at customer events.
Additionally, offering incentives or rewards for participation and achievement, such as exclusive access to content or discounts on products or services, incentivizes continued engagement and reinforces positive behaviors at the event — and even long after.
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Transform Customer Experiences Into Loyalty-Building Games
Gamification is more than just technology or playing games; it’s psychology and human-centered design. Points, badges and leaderboards aren't merely tools — they're gateways to deeper engagement and brand loyalty. Think about it this way — none of us necessarily want to go running, but if you tell us that we can run away from zombies and earn points for doing so … well, then suddenly it’s fun.
By infusing instant feedback, competition, recognition and reward into your customer journeys, you can create memorable experiences — and make customers players in your brand's story.
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