Modernising the hospitality industry through gamification
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There are several reasons why companies in the hospitality industry should consider implementing gamification and gamified apps at different levels of their business strategy. From improving employee retention rates, to increasing customer satisfaction rates, gamification has proven to be extremely effective in motivating and engaging any type of audience it is aimed at, for any purposes it is tailored to.
“But what is gamification?” I hear you ask. Simply put, gamification is applying game mechanics to a task or scenario to make it more efficient. From a hospitality perspective, either for a hotel or a restaurant, that might be by creating a gamified loyalty programme to attract repeat diners or guests, or a competition to win a free stay, or more broadly, as an effective and engaging way to recruit, onboard, and train employees.
Digital solutions for the hospitality industry
To cope with high demand, and to offer flexibility during quieter periods, pubs, cafes, and restaurants are developing apps and platforms that allow customers to order online even before entering the premises, in order to avoid queuing, and to maximise efficiency and profitability. Quite often, this is coupled with self-service touchscreens, which free up baristas and servers to keep the wheels spinning. These apps are an ideal asset in which to integrate a gamified loyalty programme.
The gamification of a loyalty programme is an excellent way for a company to boost repeat business with customers. It’s harder to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer, so securing loyalty through an engaging loyalty programme is worth its weight in gold, particularly in such a competitive industry.
All loyalty programmes essentially reward loyal customers for continued purchases. In the early days, this could be in the form of a card that would get stamped with each burrito purchased (for example), and after say, 8 burritos, they’d get a free burrito. To gamify a loyalty programme would be to add game mechanics, like earning points for purchasing meals, levelling up like in a video game, and earning opportunities to win increasingly generous prizes such as reductions or a free service in exchange for their accumulated points.
Gamifying the user experience
Gamifying a loyalty programme, or even just gamifying the experience of dining or visiting your restaurant, could be to include an instant win game like a Wheel of Fortune or a Scratch Card to win a free dessert or a muffin, or maybe something more grand, depending on the aims of the campaign and the type of establishment you’re running.
Gamification for tourism
You can also motivate customers to use particular hotels, tourist offices, shops, or other targeted establishments through marketing games and contests marketed across different websites and applications. When intelligently implementing these types of gamification marketing campaigns, that offer customers the opportunity to win a discounted rate on their next booking, a free product, or a grand prize through a contest, the engagement rate and satisfaction rates can be much higher.
For example, given advances in mobile technology, every modern customer is hyper connected on social media, and has a powerful camera and video camera built into their smartphone. Nearly everyone is constantly taking pictures and videos for TikTok and Instagram, along with other social networking sites, and this can be gamified for marketing purposes.
By introducing a Photo Contest or Video Contest, with a theme focused on your local tourism hot spots, or paths less travelled, which can easily be customised on the Drimify games creation platform, you can not only encourage customer interactions to motivate them to win say, a free meal at the hotel, or a special experience courtesy of the hotel, but also generate a lot of user generated content to use on your social media sites. You could even focus the Photo or Video Contest around an installation at a specific attraction, like a museum, or a local area of natural beauty, to encourage visits and support specific local tourism targets.
Physical installations to make gamification experiences more visible
The use of online gamification can also be extended in physical form with the installation of touch terminals, tablets, or even QR codes, which can be scanned at the reception or in the waiting areas of hotels or restaurants. This will allow you to share current offers, available services, or any information customers are looking for. You can also distribute your marketing games and contests there as well as on your website.
The power of social media
Social networks have long established themselves as a powerful tool for online communications and digital marketing. Whether you’re an established business looking to better connect with your customers and grow your audience, or a plucky startup looking to get your foot in the door – everyone is on some form of social media, so it’s an essential business battlefield upon which to deploy your marketing resources. Tourism, hospitality and restaurants are no exception.
A well curated, strategically sound social media presence allows you to effectively connect with customers and prospects by answering all questions or messages addressed to the brand. They also make it possible to effectively distribute your various marketing campaigns, and to share relevant informative content.
Adding your gamification projects to your social media pages makes for a winning duo. Gamification encourages social media users to interact with content rather than passively consuming it. Whether they’re branded mini games, topically relevant Quizzes, Photo or Video Contests, or instant win games, the interactivity of these games on social networks, and their shareability, can even attract users who were not initially targeted. If there’s a grand prize to be won, such as, say, a 2-night stay in the Maldives, and to be in with a chance of winning you need to follow a specific page, share your result, and tag a friend… to put it simply, it’s a prize everyone wants, those actions aren’t any major effort, so brand visibility can get turbocharged very quickly.
Onboarding and employee training through gamification
Businesses and organisations have been enjoying the benefits gamification can bring to employee training for a while now. In fact, before gamification was coined as a term in 2002 to encompass all practical uses of game mechanics, serious games were being used by businesses as part of corporate training, to give employees a low stakes training environment in which they could “safely fail” and learn through repeatability. A serious game is a game with a serious purpose – something not of real life, but a virtual training environment, where learners can practise skills and apply knowledge to realistic scenarios, essentially gaining simulated experience.
Serious games are an effective training tool in any job environment where a mistake in real life could be costly to a business. In the banking sector, for example, where mistakes could involve breaching various laws and standards, or in medical education, where letting medical students who aren’t ready loose patients could result in harming someone’s health. The hospitality and tourism industry, while perhaps not life and death in the literal sense, and not as laden with laws and standards as banking, is high stakes. Employees facing customers are dealing with people who are spending their valuable free time and disposable income on what could well be the highlight of their year – customers on holiday go on that holiday with typically high expectations. Failure to deliver that, or to even go the other way, could lead to bad reviews, which is really what the whole hospitality industry lives and dies by.
By using serious games and gamification in the hiring, onboarding, and training and upskilling aspects of a hotel’s human resources (HR) practices, you can more adequately prepare employees for the more challenging aspects of their job, and scenarios they’re likely to encounter. Using a format like the Dynamic Path™ on the Drimify platform allows you to create a series of modules, made up of customised Quizzes, detail-laden mini games to reinforce learnings, as well as pop-up videos, audio files, and other content to not only teach, but to give employees opportunities to apply principles and best practice procedures to realistic scenarios. Similarly, serious games can be created to shorten the hiring cycle, allowing you to assess natural aptitude in applicants.
Integrate gamification to modernise your business
By implementing different game mechanics and playful elements, mainly derived from video games, businesses in the hospitality sector can stand out and stay ahead in a very competitive industry. These playful experiences you can create through modern gamification can make employees more productive and engaged through more effective training, increase the visibility of an establishment’s brand, and motivate visits, stays, and purchases.
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