Found an interesting article from September 2014 from Caroline Papadatos which discusses the gamification of loyalty programs. It really gets the mind going, because I think the gasification side is not data driven enough and the opposite is true from the data side.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of judging the 2014 LoyaltyGames, an incredible week-long global challenge involving 1,500 practitioners and students from 102 countries, with 15 judges who were remarkably, never in the same room nor on the same continent.
The 2014 contest had three components: awareness building, game design and loyalty building. The game experiences were clever and fun, and I was won over by the sheer creative genius of the contest submissions. The loyalty component was straightforward: reward and recognize customer / donor tiers without breaking the bank. With a gamification spin, it meant solving a conventional customer engagement problem with an unconventional tool set. Sounds simple enough, but as I scanned case submissions looking for earn ratios and attainability models, all I could find were badges, likes, certificates and pins.
It is fascinating how much badges and pins can get people excited. The basis of these games has a lot of merit, but what I have a problem with is the same with social media as a channel, it is not targeted at all. There's no meat behind the game.
My answer came from Gabe Zichermann who in a recent eight-part gamification series in COLLOQUY Magazine makes the bold statement that “loyalty isn’t fun enough anymore” and our customers are bored. Gabe clearly has a point – loyalty now competes for attention in a world where Angry Birds has been downloaded two billion times. It gets worse. At the LoyaltyGames award ceremony, a renowned gamification expert accused loyalty programs of “bribing” their customers. Now my back is up, but are we outraged or outdated?
The truth is that loyalty programs need a shot in the arm, and while experience design always has a place in the loyalty tool set, few data practitioners are charming or entertaining. And gaming is not just for Millennials. The average social gamer is a 43-year-old-woman, which just happens to be the primary target market for grocers, drugstores and a host of other retailers. So why aren’t loyalty practitioners flocking to gaming?
I totally agree, loyalty programs need a shot in the arm. As I have written before, most people engaging with loyalty programs are just taking the free stuff, theres very little loyalty or behavior being driven from them. It is fascinating to combine the rich data from the loyalty programs to the fun concepts in gamification to create a targeted loyalty gamification model. I think this would work extremely well.
I could imagine a program where certain behaviors are awarded more points and a bounce back offer could include multiple point thresholds for buying everything in a market basket analysis. So if the customer who usually buys a TV also buys cables, programmable remotes and a blue-ray player, the customer will get multipliers if these are purchased in the next 2 months. This gives some fun to the loyalty program, while driving the behavior to purchase items that are typically purchased with TV's. The best of both worlds.
There’s no doubt that loyalty programs lose their luster when they became overly programmatic, but where gaming meets transactional data analysis and customer behavior change, there are notable exceptions. BrandLoyalty’s Instant Loyalty Programs in Europe, Asia and South America have a huge fun-factor for retail shoppers – on the surface they’re a widely popular collectible game for children but there is a financial underpinning that drives incremental spend, participation and superior financial performance based on maximum turnover & transactions from family households.
Whether you’re pro-loyalty or gamification, you can certainly agree with Gabe on this: “taking something that’s crummy and putting some game frosting on it won’t magically change your customer”. But let’s face it, the mix of gaming techniques and data-driven loyalty can only be good for business. And be honest, if you were given the choice of getting on a plane for yet another industry slideshow or signing up for a multi-player gaming challenge, which would you choose?
Perfect combination, a shot in the arm. The technology exists, lets gamify our programs. This is what I have been harping on about for a month. These are the types of things that create great customer experiences.