Gamification: an innovative tool supporting your digital transformation

The digitalisation of businesses has increased significantly in recent years. Numerous enterprises have really stepped up their digital transformation strategies to keep themselves productive and agile in the face of modern challenges, for example, finetuning flexible processes and systems internally, such as their approaches to customer relationship marketing (CRM) and recruitment. Incorporating gamification at the heart of that digital transformation strategy can yield numerous advantages for companies, their employees, their sales teams, and their clients.

Gamification, or the practice of applying game mechanics and game design elements to non-gaming contexts to increase user engagement, is a practice that is deeply rooted in our society. Gamified, interactive content has been handily and innovatively adapted for the digital transformation of businesses in the modern world.

Modern gamification, which mimics elements of video games, is seemingly everywhere. It is used by companies on all levels and across all business functions. On LinkedIn, posts with surveys do exceptionally well to increase user engagement. On Facebook and Instagram, you can integrate marketing games to publicise your products or keep in contact with your customers, which can help boost your customer satisfaction rate.

Defining a digital transformation strategy

It’s important before we move into specifics, to define exactly what we mean by a digital transformation strategy.

In the simplest terms, digital transformation is where a company uses digital technology to update their business processes in order to meet modern challenges. It’s the business equivalent of evolution. An industry environment changes around a company, and it must adapt in order to respond to the new challenges its environment throws at it.

Let’s look at Netflix for a dramatic example of digital transformation. Believe it or not, the streaming giant started out in 1997 and originally rented DVDs by post. By taking advantage of advances in digital technology, they completely changed how they interacted with customers and distributed entertainment, and went from being able to distribute a finite amount of products to a finite amount of customers, to having access to a global market, unlimited by physical format products. Today, they’re one of the biggest businesses in the television and film industries. By comparison, Blockbuster clung on – impressively – until 2013, still renting out physical format movies the way it always had, with the customer journey essentially unchanged since the 1990s.

Ultimately a digital transformation strategy is a roadmap for a business to not only survive changes to its environment, but to get ahead of changes and trends, and leverage innovation to get an advantage over competitors. It not only relates to how businesses interact with the customer through quickly evolving fields like digital marketing, but to methods of management, matters of process, and how information is stored and distributed internally.

Digital transformation is an inevitable route for companies to follow

In March, 2020, the global pandemic forced companies to act quickly in their digital transformations. Whether that was in the form of internal digitalisation, putting in place systems for working remotely, or external digitisation, by launching online sales platforms, or moving retail operations towards a more robust omnichannel retail structure.

Such an unexpected event, which essentially shut down businesses that were not prepared, or not equipped to adapt, was a wake-up call for a lot of entrepreneurs.

Internal digital transformation:

Internal digital transformation takes the form of putting in place internal communication tools and platforms for working remotely online, developing digital training platforms to make up for not being able to train in person, and creating virtual team-building exercises to keep a company culture intact. It’s the act of taking advantage of advancing technologies to be efficient and competitive.

Transitioning human resources (HR) departments to the digital world can be a challenging but necessary journey. As well as the technical aspects, companies also have to prepare different levels of management and their teams for the new ways of working, and show them the advantages of such huge changes.

External digital transformation:

When it comes to sales and marketing departments, they have to adapt to stay in touch with their existing clientele, and continue to reach prospective clients within their target audience. Proficiency in the world of e-commerce is just a necessary part of succeeding as a retailer today, so for bricks-and-mortar stores the challenge is to adopt and perfect a robust, omnichannel business structure. An omnichannel retailer is one where the line between the online store and the physical location is levelled, so you can return items bought online seamlessly in store, and vice-versa. The whole idea is to benefit from the advantages both formats provide, while creating a seamless and improved user experience (UX) for customers.

Let’s consider some of the sectors most affected by the global pandemic, like retail and hospitality. Such a challenge was (and I’m sorry to say it again) unprecedented, and actions taken by businesses to survive it and come out the other side will fill up academic textbooks on economics that will be studied for decades.

With multiple lockdowns forcing small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to rapidly create online shops, and move onto takeaway apps, the global health crisis represented one of the most significant challenges to businesses in recent memory. These tools, however, require a particular level of technical and logistical expertise that must be outsourced to third-party services.

What does gamification bring to the digital transformation of a company?

Modern gamification, which takes the form of interactive, highly engaging content, is an audience engagement tool adapted to face modern challenges. Gamified content can go a long way to assist a company in implementing a digital transformation strategy in a coherent manner. Gamified content can help to motivate your employees, make tasks and processes more fun, and also help in achieving corporate objectives and marketing objectives.

Because gamified experiences created on the Drimify games creation platform can collect data in real time from the dashboard feature when you create an account, gamification is a great way to measure and quantify how your digital transformation is going. As well as data from gamified processes for training and onboarding, for example, you could also create Surveys to get feedback from your people on how the process is going. In this sense, gamification can be a huge help in terms of identifying issues, and identifying people who might need more support in adapting to the changes digital transformation can bring about. Ultimately, any big changes worth making come with some friction, and different areas of change will require adapting at various stages.

Internal digitalisation:

In terms of internal digitalisation, gamification can offer the following advantages:

• Facilitate the introduction of new technologies: ease staff through the transition by the creation of interactive training modules for new company tools.
• Reduce HR costs: while the introduction of optimised interactive courses and gamified experiences for training and recruitment initially require investments of both time and money, they ultimately pay for themselves, and save money in the long-term. They shorten the hiring cycle by providing a more accurate assessment of candidate suitability, and over time, they require less labour hours to update and improve, and less labour hours are required to deliver lessons or sessions.
• Welcome new employees in a friendly manner with gamified training courses to get to know more about the company.

Here is an example of a company using gamification to raise awareness among employees of new legislation coming into effect:

External digitalisation:

Gamification can also be a tool to consider in your external digital transformation, particularly to support your digital marketing strategy. You can also:

• Support the launch of your new online shop or e-commerce operations with marketing games to help publicise your new digital space
• Help your clients discover the many functions of your digital platform through interactive content
• Launch new products online or increase visibility to potential buyers through your social media pages, your website, and your newsletter
• Create an innovative loyalty system to reward and engage customers, and ultimately foster and cultivate loyalty

Use the Drimify platform to bring gamification to your digital transformation journey

Drimify is an intuitive gamification platform with several tried-and-tested game engines to help with your digital transformation, whether you’re innovating your approach to marketing, recruitment, training, or promoting your corporate culture.

If you need advice or help creating a coherent gamification plan for your company, do not hesitate to get in touch with our team.

Photo credit: Ross Findon, Riho Kroll, Pickawood on Unsplash

Want to know more?