Using Gamification To Make Customer Portals Highly Engaging

Customer portals are a great way to use technology to engage with your customers. These tech platforms allow for increased customer satisfaction, increased engagement, and offer customers the ability to self-serve. 

Through gamification, customer portals can be even further enhanced to provide customers with highly personalised content and a fun user journey.

Gamification turns the customer portal into an exciting interaction! One that makes customers come back more and more, increasing customer retention and overall customer experience and satisfaction.

WHAT IS GAMIFICATION

Gamification is when game-like elements are applied to non-game-like digital products, in this case, the customer portal. These game-like elements provide an improved, fun, and highly interactive User eXperience (UX) when customers engage with a customer portal. 

Games and game-like elements are not new in any way and have been used in a variety of industries and scenarios for many years.

However, in the realm of customer portals, gamification is a relatively new and fresh way to disrupt how typical customer engagements are done. 

The idea behind inserting gamification elements into platforms such as customer portals is to increase a user’s motivation to use the platform and keep coming back to use it more frequently in the future. 

It’s not about transforming existing user interfaces into a game. Rather, gamification is used to inject enjoyable elements into applications and web-based platforms that traditionally lack relevance or immediacy for users.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

INCREASED CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

There are many reasons why you should be using gamification to boost your customer engagement. When done properly, companies cleverly incentivize users to do exactly what they want them to do, like boosting and encouraging specific behaviours in company-prompted tasks. Things your client traditionally might not want to do. 

There is no reason why your company shouldn’t use gamification. Your users are more likely to engage with your User Interfaces (UIs) if they are less boring. Increased interaction with your customer portal means increased user engagement. 

It’s time to cut the monotony. Gamification makes your customer portals more exciting, and this means that your users are much more inclined to interact with your customer portal regularly. 

IMPROVED CUSTOMER RETENTION

Through the addition of gamification elements and processes in customer portals, we are able to make a customer’s journey much more fun and engaging, as highlighted previously. 

These gamification elements can enhance the user’s ability to self-serve which in turn increases customer satisfaction and ultimately improves customer retention. We’re trying to help the user help themselves as much as possible. Having to chat with customer support is a dreadful activity, make use of the right strategies to improve your customer retention. 

The fun and interactive elements of the gamification experience in a customer portal, increase the likelihood that a user would want to re-engage with the platform. Gamification also consists of competitive features such as leaderboards whereby users compete to outscore each other on an ongoing basis, the competitive nature of users means that customer retention is drastically improved as users come back to score more points and beat their fellow competitors.  

BEATING YOUR COMPETITION

If your customer portal has many gamification elements woven into the platform, it makes the user experience more exciting and engaging. This will give you a distinct advantage over your competition. 

The gamification in your customer portal will set your platform apart from your competitors and you will achieve higher levels of customer engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Not only that, if your customers really love the experience of engaging with your customer portal, the chances are that they will tell their friends, family, and colleagues about how brilliant your customer portal is! This word of mouth may lead to a possible influx of new customers. 

IMPROVED CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

Customer feedback is crucial to understand how happy or unhappy they are. This feedback is vital to understand what works and what doesn’t. What frustrates your customers, and what can be done to improve this. Getting this type of feedback is not easy and customers are not normally interested in spending the time to provide you with their feedback. 

Introducing fun elements and possibly some sort of reward via a gaming mechanism may well increase the odds of customers providing you with the insights and feedback that you so desperately deserve. 

WHAT ARE THE GAMIFICATION TECHNIQUES USED IN CUSTOMER PORTALS?

ANIMATION

Animation within web interfaces has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. However, we see that the implementation of this animation is still low with few companies adding this to their websites, especially their customer portals. 

Animation brings static User Interfaces to life by adding movement and visual effects. This makes your client’s experience enjoyable and positive.

Animation is delicate and needs to be implemented in a clever and subtle manner so that it enhances the customer’s journey and doesn’t overpower it through too much movement and effects. Overdoing it can be distracting and discourages the user from engaging with the platform.  

If done right, animation adds those small effects and movement of elements that delight customers and keep them coming back for more!

PERSONALISED EXPERIENCE

The personalisation of a user’s profile can be done in various ways. Personalisation makes the customer feel special which is what any company wants. Personalisation can be done in various ways, such as personalising the content that the user sees based on prior engagements, layouts can be displayed in a different way depending on the user’s profile and elements such as avatars and colours can also be adjusted according to the customer’s profile. 

To provide personalized service, you need to have a complete view of the customer. This means understanding what they’ve bought, what they’ve browsed, and what they’ve shared with you.

POINTS, BADGES, LEADERBOARDS, AND AVATARS

Gamification mechanics can be designed in such a way that users earn points for completing certain activities. This really makes the experience rewarding, yet it can lead to users becoming highly competitive. 

This competition aspect seriously increases engagement rates and boosts the popularity of the customer portal. 

With a points-based system, users may be able to achieve badges associated with their profile based on achieving certain points totals. Being able to accumulate points gives users instant gratification that triggers positive sentiment to the user experience and actions that they have taken to earn these points. 

Avatars may also be updated to showcase that a user has reached a certain level of points. 

Leaderboards are often used in the video gaming industry and are highly effective when it comes to gamification. Users are ranked in a table based on their achievements and points accumulated. Seeing how users compare to their peers entices them to increase their engagement and earn more points in order to climb the leaderboard. 

Leaderboards are great for showing a user real-time progress compared to other players and allow users to set goals for themselves. Ultimately, leaderboards are a fundamental element of gamification and their main purpose is to boost engagement. 

PRIZES

Prizes are also a key driver of user behaviour and engagement. Who doesn’t want to win a prize? Prizes entice users to complete more activities and can be incorporated into leaderboards to inform all participants of the available prizes and when they are up for grabs. 

Naturally the better the prizes are, the more that users will “play” to win them. Prizes vary in shape and form and can be physical prizes or unlockable features and appearances in the portal - for example, different themes for the dashboard, avatars, stickers in chats, and much more.

Prizes play a huge role in getting users to perform actions that they previously may not have contemplated completing. Incorporating prizes in the customer portal will add excitement and increase engagement.

BUILD A COMMUNITY

Building a community is also possible within a customer portal and through the implementation of gamification. However, this does not apply to all businesses and industries, but if possible, it can go a long way to keep users coming back to the customer portal to engage and increase their interactions. 

These communities typically allow users to view each other’s profiles, their achievements and where they rank in the gamification activities. Communities promote a sense of belonging and loyalty toward the customer portal. 

INSTANT FEEDBACK

When users interact with the customer portal and they’ve achieved a certain milestone or completed a task, it’s important to provide the user with instant feedback. This is nothing new, but by adding gamification elements to the customer portal, makes providing instant feedback in a much more fun and interactive way, by using movement and animation.

Not only is it important to provide your customers with feedback, but it’s also important to obtain feedback from them. This crucial exercise is often ignored or overlooked and omitted from customer portals. You can entice users to provide you with the feedback you desire through gamification by providing them with a reward or points. Using gamification this whole experience can be interactive and highly engaging. Gamification creates a win-win situation for you and your client.

LET’S WRAP THIS UP 

Gamification makes a customer portal come alive. It creates hype for the users and increases engagement, customer loyalty and satisfaction. Gamification is not always straightforward to implement and often many game-type elements are intertwined, for example, completing tasks earns you points, which in turn allocates you badges which all show in a leaderboard. 

Careful planning and consideration need to be done prior to adding gamification to a customer portal but if done correctly, the rewards are massive and highly valuable to both the customers who use the portal and the company. 

Animation is definitely the way forward when it comes to customer portals and by making visual elements animated through movement and intuitive graphics, it adds to the game-like feel and overall fun aspect of the customer portal.

It’s no secret that we at Elemental love designing and developing bespoke customer portals, and we love taking them a notch further by introducing cleverly thought-out gamification elements. 

Looking for a customer portal with embedded gamification? Get in touch with us and we can discuss your requirements.