Kris Duggan

Using gamification in your business boosts customer loyalty and engagement. But you need to know how to motivate customers to do what you'd like them to by providing the right types of rewards and understanding effective modes of gamification.

In short, yes, gamification works. That being said, gamification is not a panacea for your business woes. If your business or product is lousy, or if you're at the bottom of a dying industry, gamification alone can't save you. People look for value; if your value proposition stinks, gamification won't make it smell like roses.

Interested in applying gamification to your business? If so, the first thing you need to recognize is gamification is a program, not just a project. You can’t just apply gamification for three months and call it a day; you need to invest in the strategy for the long term. These are the steps involved in developing a gamification program.

If you’ve opted to go the provider route to build your gamification site, the next obvious question is, what provider should you choose? Although gamification is a relatively new industry, there are numerous organizations to choose from. This is by no means an exhaustive list of gamification providers. It’s a growing industry, and new players emerge (and old ones fold) at a breathtaking pace.

Business gamification uses elements like points, achievements, levels, leaderboards, missions, and contests to drive desired behaviors. All of a sudden, promoting a brand becomes fun for customers, and sharing troubleshooting solutions with fellow consumers is an engaging challenge. Likewise, employees actually enjoy training instead of seeing it as a chore, and they’re motivated to work harder on a day-to-day basis.

Any good gamification guru will tell you: You’re only as good as the tools in your toolbox. When it comes to game mechanics, various tools are available to you — each designed to elicit a specific reaction in players. You can combine these tools in nearly infinite ways to create a broad spectrum of responses and experiences.

You can attract users to your gamified business website using various types of rewards. Arguably, business gamification rewards are in three categories, recognition, privileges, and monetary: Recognition: Pretty much everyone wants to be recognized for their achievements. Recognition for completing a task or accomplishing a goal not only feeds this basic human need, it also encourages engagement and increases repetition — both of which are probably in your list of business objectives.

Business gamification is all about driving key behaviors. You can harness game mechanics to enable people to experience something they like. In general terms, here are a few things people like: Recognition: Recognition, a foundational building block for gamification, simply means acknowledging desired behaviors.

A gamification framework is a holistic program designed to achieve a specific business objective. The framework you use depends on the outcome you want to achieve. Note that you can mix frameworks. As you might expect, you have many options in terms of gamification frameworks. We’ve identified six broad approaches, each designed to address a specific business need: Social loyalty: This framework is for customer-facing experiences that occur in nonsocial environments, such as a traditional e-commerce experience.