CRM Gamification As A Business Growth Engine

The changing nature of the business world imposes conditions and requirement for the further prolific development. Several decades ago appeared CRM technology for facilitation the customer data management and cumbersome processes and workloads. The next step to the advancement become the advent of CRM gamification - the concept that was added to drive the processes and employees’ performance in the preferred direction for the faster and successful goals achievement.

Dig into the Term of Gamification

What is hidden behind this notion? Some businesses understand gamification in its ordinary sense as a kind of some game. While the others master this newly-gained technique for more efficient process management and team spirit establishment. To be more precise, the term ‘gamification’ was coined in 2002 by a computer programmer Nick Pelling. Thus, this concept started its popularity route in 2010. So, gamification is a set of game-design thinking techniques and mechanisms for non-game apps that aims to involve and motivate customers/employees for accomplishing tasks or activities. These leverages are utilized in different areas of business (marketing, sales processes, and big data management). Recent surveys show that CRM gamification in in-house company administration and revenue boost.

Customer Gamification As A New Tactic

The high growth of employing the gaming aspects can be seen in retailing for increasing levels of customers in the loyalty and frequent client programs. In the 2015 CRM/Unified Commerce Survey is stated that gamification is expected to raise from 3% to 31% in this year. Continuing the trending customer-centric strategy, vendors use the personalized and customizable selling and extend the borders of communication and look for more touch points with clients via social media, communities and forums.

CRM Gamification: Handling Challenges of Revenue Growth

The adherers of implementing the gaming mechanisms see a plenty of advantages for workflow optimizations, employees’ engagement and improving data entry and further timely updates. The process of gamifying your performance requires a well-thought strategy as any business activity. Having a clear vision of the final results of the gamification, you will

• manage all the impacts on the customer life cycle,
• drive staff engagement and awareness of the processes,
• enhance lead nurturing, and
• improve the buying experience.

Targeting their CRM gamification, vendors pay close attention to the following areas

#1 User Adoption

Gamification deals with human behavior, so this mechanism is quite useful in engaging employees for a faster adoption and well-tuned CRM and business strategy alignment.

#2 Distorted Sales Forecasting

Usually, managers are prone to overestimate the value of the transaction, its revenue, and duration of the sale cycle. To reduce and preempt such nasty incidents, you may use some elements of the gamification. If sales reps make accurate deal estimating and sales cycle length, the quality of your data will be higher and efficient.

#3 Reducing Lead Duplications

The issue of duplicated records is faced by nearly every company. The copies of leads require time to deal with them and having different owners are impossible to merge. To prevent double lead conversion and multiple calls to the same customer, set up rules for fast and timely data cleansing for extra scores.

#4 Rewarding the Timeliness of the Opportunities

Quite often sales reps prefer not to close the lost deal and keep it pending for months or even years. That creates a mess in the database and provides inaccurate data for reports what in its turn has a negative impact on revenue calculation and forecasting. In general, the points should be scored for closed and lost deals to have relevant records. For the delayed update of the missing transactions, the scoring of the worker must be reduced. Obviously, any changes can’t be done overnight, yet with the implementation of CRM gamification; you will speed up the routine processes and motivate employees to use CRM in a full scale, enter and update records timely. If you still consider whether it is worth to adopt a CRM solutions, download the free ebook ‘Make CRM Investments Foolproof’ and figure out the advantages of the initiative for business development.