Supercharging Community Engagement With Gamification

Introduction

The popularity of gamification in business processes is increasing everyday. And why not, it’s an effective way to engage customers. 

This is more so in online communities, where engagement is the parameter by which success is measured. 

Now, Salesforce enables you to create online communities on Experience Cloud. And gamifying them with different elements helps you engage users.

As far as gamification is concerned, the term ‘Behavioural Game Theory’ is relevant. 

It enables you to analyze the calculated circumstances in a game and determine the success of individuals depending on the choices they make. 

Let’s take a brief look at what ‘game theory’ is and how to measure gamification ROI.

We will also talk about customized solutions to engage users in your Salesforce-powered community.

So, let’s begin!

The Key Aspects of Behavioural Game Theory

Game theory enables you to understand user psychology. For example, it is used to understand the economic behavior of consumers, the market, and firms. 

Implementing game theory can help you understand community member behavior, as well as drive engagement.

Benefits of Implementing Game Theory in Online Communities

By analyzing the psychology of community members, you can figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. It empowers you with:

• Insights into lesser-known aspects that arise in situations of conflicting interests
• A framework for analyzing decision-making
• A scientific quantitative technique to deduce the optimal strategy to drive engagement

Gamifying Online Communities to Drive Engagement

Gamification is the application of ‘Game Theory’. In online communities, it makes mundane tasks more interesting and rewarding for community members.

By incentivizing community participation, you can drive engagement with gamification elements.

These include rewards, leaderboards, badges, points, and more.

For example, a leading beverage chain came out with a rewards system based on the frequency of customer purchases. 

As a result, more customers felt the desire to keep reaping rewards with their participation. You can do the same for your online community!

Benefits of Gamifying Online Communities

Now that we know how gamification helps you engage community members, let’s take a look at some of its other benefits:

Transform Community Members Into Brand Advocates 

With gamification, you can connect with community members’ emotions. When they feel connected, they engage more.

Gamifying communities creates a feeling of belonging, importance, security and happiness and turns community members into brand advocates. 

Deliver Better Customer Support

Gamification enables you to boost support within the community.

For instance, customers visit communities when they have a query or challenge with your service or product. 

Members get points for answering questions, level up, gain rank, and become recognized within the community. 

Therefore, community members can help themselves out and get rewarded while doing so. 

Deliver Better CX 

To enhance experiences, you need to provide customers with personalized and engaging products and services.

By gamifying your online community, you can do just that. Gamification works to provide incentives and amplify community engagement.

It is a great way to motivate people to answer support questions in your community, helping boost CX efforts. 

Measuring the ROI of Online Community Gamification

By measuring the ROI of community gamification initiatives, you can figure out if they’re working for you or not, and what you can do to improve their effectiveness. 

Here are steps you can take to measure the ROI of gamification:

Step 1: Set up a baseline figure.

Step 2: Define KPIs relevant to the process. 

Step 3: Compare KPIs before and after implementing gamification.

Step 4: Compare KPIs in correlation with gamification activity performance.

Step 5: Measure the balance of different aspects of gamification in different groups.

Step 6: Use control groups and measure activity.

Step 7: Start with a simulation of the gamification rule set on past data to create the performance baseline before starting the process.

Gamification on Salesforce-Powered Communities

With Experience Cloud, you can foster relationships with customers and employees on online communities. 

Gamification on Salesforce can help you engage community members more. 

At Grazitti, we’ve built ScoreNotch, a Salesforce-native and Lightning-ready solution for Experience Cloud to create exciting experiences for community members. 

It enables you to:

• Gamify standard and custom Salesforce objects
• Customize the look and feel of leaderboards, such as font & background color, text, and rows to be displayed
• Create as many reputation levels as needed
• Enable criteria-based scoring based on standard and custom objects
• View all users and score leaderboards on a weekly or monthly basis

Conclusion

Gamification is the driving force behind engagement in online communities.

It enables you to create engaging experiences to make communities resourceful and drive organizational success.

In this blog post, we covered the key aspects of game theory and how gamification can drive community engagement. 

We also learned about the benefits of gamification and how ScoreNotch helps you dynamically gamify your Salesforce-powered community. 

Want to Leverage ScoreNotch for Salesforce Gamification? Let’s Talk.