3 virtual games which taught me the most about the real world (1/3)

I love playing business simulation games. This genre of the game always allows me to experience hypothetical situations before encountering them in real life. I started getting used to playing computer games when I was 13. After playing a lot of games, the first game where I observed a spike in my average gaming hours per day was Zoo Tycoon.

It is a series of business simulation games where the primary responsibility was building and running zoo scenarios from scratch. I never thought the game will continue to have such a long-lasting effect on my mind even after a decade of playing it.

The objectives of the game were as follow :

1. As a player, you have to build a zoo and subsequently expand or upgrade by purchasing animals, creating suitable animal habitat, allocating staff for their care and maintenance of zoo
2. Secondly, you have to take care of visitors by providing them safety and also building food stands, restrooms, picnic areas, well-placed dustbins and creating a pleasant environment
3. Lastly, it was all about making your zoo profitable and expanding it owing to higher revenue

When I see it now after a decade, the ultimate goal of the game was to keep your animals and visitors happy and taking optimum care of their sentiments as it had a quintessential role to play in revenue. The game became even more exciting when you have limited resource to achieve certain goals.

In the beginning, I used to just keep on expanding zoo by having more of everything: animals, food stands, restrooms, hotspots, picnic areas, visitors. And every time I used to observe a low sentiment of both animals and visitors. At 14, it didn’t strike me about the problem I was facing.

But later I changed my strategy: I planned a threshold number of everything and then I worked on providing a better experience to my visitors, superior care to zoo animals and high-quality maintenance to zoo premises. Unless and until I was able to provide an optimum experience (by observing visitor and animals sentiment) I didn’t push for next threshold. And surprisingly it worked.

Key Takeaways:

1. Howsoever unusual (read: anecdotal ) it may seem but in most of the business, you have to take care of the satisfaction and happiness quotient of all your stakeholders. The one who is able to provide the best experience is going to make a mark in the industry since when competitors across the same industry rationalise, the differentiating factor more often than not is customer satisfaction and sentiments.
2. Another important aspect is consistency. The ability to provide astounding customer experience day in and day out turns new customers into loyal customers. It is getting unsurprisingly difficult to differentiate yourself from other businesses when everyone is providing the same solution. But a competitive advantage is huge when it comes to not what but how well you are providing the solution, and customer experience is the perfect tool to help you stand out from your competitors.

Some facts to observe:

• According to a survey by PwC, most customers across a variety of industries are willing to pay 16% more if it means improved customer service
• According to a survey by House of Consumer Affairs, when customers churn, 61% take their business to a competitor

Lastly, let us give a thought about why we are asked to do certain things every day. We are asked to provide stars to our trips/rides, We are asked to give feedback of our shopping experience, We are asked to grade our hotel stays, We are asked to rate food delivery partners and restaurants from where we order food.

Because when the businesses approach towards the path to profitability, there's a shift in the paradigm towards customer experience.

I hope you will like the important lessons I learned from a virtual game. I would love to share the second article of this series, in the meanwhile, you can share reasons you spent more time playing a particular game as compared to others.