How to Gamify a Loyalty Program
Using Gamification to design a loyalty program.
Here’s a challenge for you: Think of a loyalty program concept for a telecommunications technology ( AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile etc. ) company where consumers interact with the company only once per month when it’s time to pay the bill ( with AutoPay no interaction happens at all ).
How would you solve the issue of customers being actively engaged with the brand daily through a loyalty program?
This article is about my concept on solving this task.
“How are we going to practice football without any footballs?”
“Right. How many men are on the football field at any given time?”
“22!”
“Alright and how many people are touching the football at any given time?”
“Well, one of them!”
“Right. So we are going to work on what those other 21 guys are doing.”
It’s a mistake to focus all of the value of a loyalty program at the once specific point in time when users earn points and then figure out what can he do with those points.
Gamification suggests 3 words — Narratives, Progress, Tasks
Narrative
Narrative allows to create scenery around the service. Characters to cheer towards, a story to follow and visuals to enjoy. Narrative creates connection between the user and the solution being used.
Furthermore, narrative allows to introduce mascots and other key characters that combine the application with its brand.
Loyalty program would be an ideal place to have marketing being involved in the creation of the mascot of the brand.
Narrative on it’s own is not too effective because there has to be a way for the user to make progress in the narrative for it to be immersive.
Progress
Progress advances the story, explains new aspects of the narrative and unlocks surprises that can be used for further game elements like mystery and chance.
How to create create progress without the user’s interaction. Why would anyone want to open a AT&T application beyond seeing their payables?
Secret is in the data. Chances are that every telecommunications company has enough data about their users to make the data the prime source for the “game”.
Imagine turning the data into progress. How many text messages sent; how much mobile data used; longest phone call or even number of different telecom masts registering your phone.
This data suggests how long has the user been a loyal customer and that in turn defines progress in the loyalty program.
That kind of data can be used to create milestones, levels, achievements, leaderboards and all other gamified elements.
But how does simply showing this data actually help our cause in creating interactions?
Tasks
“Interaction” in this context is not actually interacting with the application. It’s about being constantly aware of the brands existence.
Create tasks, quests and unlockables in the loyalty program that are related to the data the app has on you but not through a separate game.
For example: Be the person in the family plan who used the least amount of data this month or if the loyalty program enables to collect loyalty points through different activities then who was the highest contributor amongst a family plan?
Create titles like “Explorer” for people who have connected with 100 different masts. Collect specific mast points across the country and turn this feature into a road trip suggestion.
Most consumer facing companies have the data to play around with and create interesting conversation with their audience.
Turn it all into a loyalty program
After having different achievements, narratives and data points figured out, only then it’s time to actually think about the rewards.
Combine rewards with the activity which produced the reward.
For example an achievement type activity suggests high interest in being active in using the features which signals high loyalty. Those reward should probably be more intrinsic such as avoiding lines for customer service.
On the other hand being the person with the highest data usage implies being more motivated by extrinsic rewards. Focusing on rewards like discounts on plans or electronics would make more sense here.
Not only it makes sense to offer different rewards for different activities — most importantly this is about RECOGNITION.
Recognize users by understanding what is valuable to its customer through offering relevant rewards.
Gamification in a loyalty program is not about how many points should a certain activity reward and how are you shown on the leaderboard. Those are all the end results.
Gamification in loyalty program is designing the user engagement in a way that promotes brand association.
Starting the design from points and rewards makes it much more difficult to design brand association on top of it.
If you found this article interesting and wish to stay in the loop about how well are companies using User Engagement Design, don’t forget to recommend this article and follow my blog @ www.kalevkarpuk.com
For more on User Engagement Design read my other posts
- How to Create Genuine Loyalty With Loyalty Programs
- What to Focus on When Improving User Engagement?
- 3 Phases of an Engaging Application
- Who is a User Engagement Designer
