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Winning With Customers And Employees
By Kim Zimmermann, Managing Editor

Just a few years ago, gamification was a fairly untested concept and there weren’t a lot of companies offering technology to integrate gaming techniques into customer and employee engagements. I worked for a supermarket trade magazine at the time and would occasionally get a press release about a new “gamified” application, but it really didn’t catch fire and I never found a retailer using it.

What a difference a few years makes. In a recent article on the topic, Retail TouchPoints Contributor Jonathan Lee talked about how Whole Foods is putting gamification to work to encourage customers to eat healthy. This is a great way to get shoppers engaged with the retailer and fits in perfectly with the Whole Foods mission of promoting healthy lifestyles.

Supermarkets, which are notoriously slow to adopt technology, are among the many industries expected to use gamification to motivate shoppers and employeesover the next several years. The first installment of the three-part series noted that Gartner research predicted that more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations would have at least one gamified application by 2014. That’s serious business.

While it hasn’t always been called gamification and it hasn’t always been formalized, the idea has been around for as long as people have played games. As a kid, I remember the local ice cream shop having a card that you could have punched for a free ice cream after you purchased 10. I blame them for my life-long addiction to Maple Walnut.

Almost every part-time job I worked at as a teenager or college student had some sort of competition for employees — win a prize if you sell the most donuts in a shift, get the most people to sign up for a store credit card in a week, etc.

What has changed is that everything today is driven by technology. Customers can compete in games on their phones to gain points toward some goal rather than keeping a card in their pocket that they whip out when they are in the store to get a “punch” toward a free ice cream.

The problem with the paper-based “game” at the ice cream shop was that they didn’t know much about me aside from the fact that I purchased the required number of items to get a free one. In a digital world, they would know that I always bought a Maple Walnut cone at about 3 p.m. That’s much more powerful information. And surely I would have gotten involved in some sort of competition if it meant earning more ice cream. It is probably a good thing that wasn’t possible back then.

The retailers who will win at the gamification game will use the technology to learn more about their customers, their preferences and what motivates them. Are they jazzed when they can collect “badges” and compare themselves to their peers?Are they interested in joining a community of like-minded customers? Or, do they just want to earn points toward free stuff?

When retailers know more about their customers, consumers win with products that are more tailored to their needs and retailers gain more sales.

Follow Kim on Twitter: @KimZim2764