Are you a member of the Streak Society? If you are a Duolingo user, you will know what I mean. Duolingo is the language app that has 500 million registered users, 37 million of whom are active once a month. But learning languages is boring, right? So how has Duolingo achieved its extraordinary success? Well, a key reason is gamification. In short, Duolingo has borrowed design elements from the gaming world to make learning fun.
Which brings us back to the Streak Society. One of Duolingo's most successful gamification techniques is the Streak, which challenges users to complete a lesson every day. A streak is represented by a little flame icon with a number next to it. It greys out and defaults to zero when a task is missed. Unsurprisingly, users will do anything to avoid this. And Duolingo ups the ante by giving out extra rewards for passing milestones. In 2020, it introduced the Streak Society, an exclusive club for users with a 365 day unbroken streak. Users love the kudos of belonging to this VIP cohort. In the process, of course, they keep learning.
Everything’s a game
Gamification techniques such as the streak have swept across product design over the last decade. These techniques are not about gaming per se. Instead, they apply game principles in a non-game context. Designers gamify their products using tried-and-tested elements like points, badges, leaderboards, performance graphs and more.
Why do these features work so well? It’s because they deploy irresistible psychological triggers such as the variable reward (what will I get?), the tantalising delay before the 'reward' is delivered, the urge to compare with others, the desire to complete a task and more. They plug into our universal compulsions to compete, solve puzzles, compare ourselves with others and tell stories. They have proved to be very effective at increasing user engagement and enticing users to interact with content.
Today, gamification has taken off to such an extent that it has broken out beyond the tech world. Companies in a wide range of verticals are now committed to the concept. One example is the badges awarded by fitness tracking devices and apps. By tracking the user's fitness regime, badges are awarded based on the milestones achieved which can also lead to discounts on products. Even banking has adopted it. The new challenger banks are leading the way. Last summer, for example, Revolut invited its customers to earn points for completing challenges such as making transactions, sending money, referring friends and saving. These points qualified customers for a weekly prize draw.
Most telcos are not playing
If a sector as 'dry' as banking is experimenting with gamification, you would think telecoms might be on a similar path. However, the reality is that telco firms are behind the curve in applying this kind of innovation. While telcos have successfully introduced intuitive new digital channels – from apps to websites to kiosks to bots – these products tend to focus more on customer care than showcasing new services, creating unique offers with partners or implementing cross-platform loyalty programmes.
Consider the mobile carriers' own customer-facing apps. Telcos encourage their subscribers to download these apps in order to easily track their minutes or assess upgrades. As a result, these apps sit on millions of smartphones. However, most customers simply do not open them regularly. They have little incentive to do so.
This is a missed opportunity. By gamifying the customer journey, CSPs could incentivise customers to interact with their platforms every day. The resultant boost in engagement should create significant new value . It could generate data that helps CSPs understand their subscribers better, and thereby create more compelling personalised offers. And the long-term effect? More brand loyalty and a shift that leads customers to see telcos as part of their daily lives.
And there is now evidence to show that gamification can help telcos realise these goals.
A pioneering project - Ready Telco One
To better understand the potential of gamification in the telco industry, a TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst project was performed to focus on this topic.
Ready Telco One was led by Orange Group and Orange Poland together with Netcracker, Microsoft, Radisys and Comviva. It invited consumers to enroll in a gamified loyalty scheme on their mobile devices. The more partner apps they used, the more points they could earn which could be used to unlock offers from the CSP and its brand partners. In turn, the CSP gained more behavioural data, which it then combined with AI/ML models to optimise its loyalty efforts and recommend new experiences to its customers.
The project team estimated that this particular gamification scheme could deliver one million new app customers for CSPs, with a €0.55 boost in ARPU and €18m of new revenue every month.
Shortly afterwards, TM Forum published its IG1205 Gamification and Continuous Communication with Customers white paper. The paper provided an overview of gamification concepts and showed how telcos can use them to improve customer stickiness and create new revenue streams.
What could gamification look like in the telco industry?
Thanks to initiatives like Ready Telco One, CSPs are now learning how best to apply gamification to their unique activities to make user engagement more interesting, incentive-driven and fun. Here are some examples of how gamification principles can be used in a telecom context:
Gamified Discovery
Turning product search into a discovery game – complete with rewards or prizes.
Gamified Campaigns and Promotions
Privacy regulation is increasing customer opt outs. Marketers can use game mechanics to reverse this trend. They can reward customers for completing log-in profiles for example.
Gamified Purchase
Major consumer brands frequently use immersive technologies to let customers virtual test their products before purchase. CSPs have the chance to do the same.
Gamified Service Journeys
Customers love self-service when it is done right. CSPs can use tools such as interactive quizzes and visual assistance to assist the customer while giving him or her a sense of self-accomplishment.
Gamified employee engagement
Gamification principles can be applied inside the enterprise too. Telcos can give employees unique digital avatars that reflect their expertise, achievement badges, live quizzes, ranking tables and more.
Needless to say, all of the above applications of gamification are not ends in themselves. They must lead to tangible benefits. But as the Ready Telco One project indicates, there is a genuine upside to gamified customer experiences. These include:
Reduced churn
Better and exclusive experiences should deliver better traction with a customer. The reduced churn rate is a natural expected result.
Lower costs for onboarding
Gamifying the onboarding process for new customers should result in more completions. This will reduce marketing and sales costs and cut the number of customer care queries.
More ARPU
By analysing gamified customer journeys, CSPs can deliver genuine personalized experiences, which they can modify over time. Customers will respond by spending more.
Higher customer lifetime value
Gamification doesn't merely deliver short term gains in onboarding etc. Done well, it should keep a customer constantly engaged over the long term.
Today’s telco sector is deeply embedded with the world of gaming. Consumers now spend more money on mobile games than they do on consoles. People clearly love gameplay. And yet most CSPs have so far failed to learn how to apply the core principles of play into their own and partner products to transform their customer’s experience and bring new value. It’s not too late. The tools and the expertise are out there. They just need to unlock them, and proceed to the next level.
