Gamification: The Natural Next Step for Retailers

Mohan Veloo, Vice President, Technology, APCJ, F5

If you’ve ever used Grab’s ride-hailing services, you would be familiar with the pop-up notification for reward points you have earned from every ride. Congratulations, you’ve just encountered one of the many forms of gamification! From reward points to airline miles and ride vouchers, everyone has participated in some form of gamification today.

Applications are gateway to customers – old and new. With so many brands launching apps these days, users are experiencing app fatigue and are becoming increasingly discerning on which app they keep. Given that the number of apps in the iOS App Store alone will reach 5 million by 2020, it’s no surprise that gamification is climbing high on the agenda of many retailers as they look for more innovative ways to create an exciting experience to standout and to keep customers engaged amidst the growing clutter.

Add on the fact that the new generation of shoppers are now showing a preference for in-store shopping over online, retailers need to focus on delivering an integrated experience that cuts across both online and offline channels. Some retailers are already delivering on this experience with Taobao launching a new integrated store in Singapore to cater to the changing needs of its customers, for instance. 

There appears to be a lot of hurdles that retailers have to leap over but where there’s a will, there’s a way. Here are three things that retailers should focus on to successfully gamify their applications:     

1.    Know what motivates your customers

Seems like an obvious point but sometimes in a rush to push out gamification on apps to keep customers engaged, retailers might fail to consider if the gamification they are pushing out even appeals to their customers. An example of this would be Zappos. The retailer created an elaborate interactive experience for their customers to experience a virtual world and discover products which could essentially be accessed through its main site. The failure lay in the fact that the team did not stop to consider if this gamification added any value to their customers. A good reminder to retailers out there to be more deliberate when deciding on what they should be pushing out to their customers –to ultimately resolve their pain points.

2.    Investing in the right mix of technology

Two years back, Tilly’s, a teen retailer in the US, launched a mobile scavenger hunt that urged shoppers to use its app in-store to search for virtual coins to win attractive prizes. This is just one way that retailers have been successfully using technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) to engage their customers across online and offline platforms. This formula worked for Tilly’s as they understood their customer demographic well and knew what would be engaging to them before investing in the technologies to deliver this experience – from the back-end infrastructure to support the game to the AR technology itself. Yes, infrastructure as well – after all, you don’t want your users to walk away due to poor load time or constant crashes.

3.    Are you even secure?

In the race to gamify applications, do not neglect the aspect of security. With news of breaches hitting us with growing regularity, customers are becoming unforgiving when it comes to security. In fact, almost three in five customers in APAC would choose to stop using an application altogether if data security is compromised. The implication? No matter how engaging or seamless the experience is on your app, customers are likely to drop it in a heartbeat if it is found to be not secure. Threats are always evolving and elevating to the next level. With more features and add-ons on your apps, the likelihood of vulnerabilities tends to grow as well. Consider implementing DevSecOps practices to detect and patch these vulnerabilities before the hackers even get a whiff.

Don’t just gamify your apps for the sake of it. Knowing your customers and learning how best to use the latest in technology to deliver an engaging and secure experience to them is the first step towards successfully gamifying your applications. Now that you are armed with the knowledge of what to consider, go forth and gamify away!