How to turn work into pleasure? How to get customers interested so that they adore your company? To achieve your strategic goals, you create a separate "world".
How to turn work into pleasure? How to get customers interested so that they adore your company? The answer is from Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, authors of Engage and Conquer: Turn your business into a rewarding game. To do this, you need to know several principles of game thinking:
Glasses and badges allow gamers to feel the progress of the game. Points are the simplest way to calculate any kind of progress. Badges are a more meaningful version of glasses. This is a visual representation of achievements in gameplay.
Foursquare, a service that draws users to local establishments by forcing them to log their location using their phone, features a variety of badges for every possible achievement. Users can unlock the Adventurer badge as soon as they have registered at the ten locations already listed on Foursquare, while the Full Break badge requires registering at four different bars overnight.
Ratings. Players often want to know where they are in relation to competitors. In addition, ranking creates an environment for development that points and badges do not provide. If indicators are important in the game, the rating makes these indicators public - everyone can see them.
When contextualized, rankings can be powerful motivators. Knowing that a few points are enough to move up a line or even to the top line can be a powerful boost for users.
There is no monotony. At the very first stage, everything should be very simple in order to attract the user to the game. As soon as the player crosses this threshold, it is advisable to increase the difficulty. If the experience of the player on the hundredth and first days of the game is not different, most of the users will get bored with such a game.
In a game like World of Warcraft, going from level 1 to level 2 takes less time and experience points than going from level 20 to level 21, and even more so from level 84 to level 85.
Informational feedback for progress towards the goal - “You have completed three of the five steps required to obtain the EXCELLENT WORK badge” - usually involves the player and motivates him to go through the other steps necessary to complete the task. This method has been used by game developers for a long time. Video games are a celebration of feedback, with ratings, fanfare, and more, every time something important happens.
An unexpected reward. Fast and consistent feedback in the form of points, badges or ratings is necessary, but not enough. People love to be surprised at achievements and rewards they didn't expect.
Compared to the expected rewards - for example, when you know that you will receive a badge by posting 100 tweets about our product - receiving an unexpected badge or prize is more positive. When this happens, the players' dopamine levels rise, like they hit the jackpot in a slot machine.
What is the emphasis - these are the actions. If you create feedback among your employees (scores, ratings, etc.) on customer satisfaction rather than sales metrics, they will start thinking more about customer service rather than monthly sales, and vice versa. Used wisely, this will be a powerful tool in any gami ed system.
Freedom of choice. A system that provides a reward but no choice will quickly get bored and insecure for most players. In World of Warcraft, the player can choose from several types of characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Or, for example, a project participant can engage in various activities to earn points for their team. While all of these features serve the same purpose, they provide the user with a sense of independence.
The motives of the players are different. The most famous classification of gamers was developed in the late 1980s by researcher Richard Bartle. He studied the first massively multiplayer online games. Bartle identified four types of players: munchkins, explorers, party-goers, and assassins.
Munchkins love to chase new levels or earn points; researchers want to discover new content; party-goers prefer to chat with friends; and assassins want to influence other players, usually trying to defeat them.
All of these principles can be used in business. To achieve your strategic goals, you create a separate "world", and it makes sense for others, for example, for your website visitors or your call center staff. They move towards the goals that you have defined, but not because they are forced to do it, but because they want to, because it is very interesting to play.
