How does CRM gamification help in driving customer engagement? - Kapture CRM

Gamification is the application of game techniques in non-gaming environments to effect continuous improvement. In the context of a business application, gamification aims to improve employee as well as customer engagement.

The fundamental concept behind gamification is that it works on the human need for competitiveness and makes an individual want to constantly improve themselves and excel at their activities, and do so in an enjoyable manner. Gamification guides the individual on a desired path by motivating them with more engaging and fun processes, rather than stunting their productivity with dull and repetitive tasks.

Where there’s gamification, there’s a provision for a reward system. For your employees, rewards can be provided as points, badges, or creative titles in order to acknowledge their performance on a continuous basis rather than a quarterly or half-annually period. On the other hand, gamification for your customers can be in the form of exclusive discounts, time-based offers, etc., which may give an incentive to the customers to purchase from your business.

With the advent of the digital age, businesses are increasingly adopting technological innovations to improve their internal workings, and gamification is no different. A well-established and efficient software system allows you to capture your customer data and store it centrally, so that your company’s gamification methods can be aligned with your business objectives.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software service is one such tool that can be used to effectively implement a gamification strategy. When used correctly and efficiently, CRM-enabled gamification can help convert your loyal customers into the biggest ambassadors for your business.

Identify the Customer

Before engaging with the customer, you need to first identify who they are. Traditionally, marketing teams go through mountains of data to search for the relevant information about their customers, and then manually store and organize it into physical databases. By using CRM, all the monotonous work can now be automatically performed by the system itself, reducing the amount of time that a marketer wastes on the entry of data.

Now, the marketers can focus on the more important part of the process – identifying the leads and ranking them according to their profitability. With gamification, you can create internal competitions by pitting marketing groups against each other and allot rewards for the most productive time, for instance. This will keep them engaged and motivate them to work harder to produce the best results. With the CRM system, you can easily track each team’s progress and visualize it with a leaderboard-style ranking graph.

Interact with the Customer

Once the leads have been recognized and qualified by the marketing team, it’s time for your business to directly engage them and work to successfully convert them into a long-term customer. With the use of the various available communication channels – one popular medium being social networking sites – you can hold contests and raffles and invite your customers to try out your products and share their experiences with their friends and acquaintances on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This makes the customer engagement process much more lively and paves the way for friendly customer-business relationships.

With CRM integration, you can obtain and share useful information about the progress of the various engagement activities from a single database, facilitating easier access and connectivity between the various teams. By ranking up the progress of each team based on their performance, the teams can see how well they are doing compared to their peers, which may encourage them to work harder.

Retain the Customer

Once the contests have been completed, it is time to analyze and study the results in the CRM database. With powerful CRM analytic tools, you can easily gauge the performance of each individual as well as a team, and train your weakest performers for improvement.

Your sales team can work on this data, and re-align their plans and preparation to effectively change the customer into a long-term, loyal and satisfied customer.

At the end of the day, an engaged customer can only come from an engaged employee. So it is imperative for a business to drive customer engagement with the aid of employee engagement. And gamification is a big help when it comes to achieving this major feat.