Zengage, The Zendesk Blog

Badgeville Basics: Game Mechanics and Customer Loyalty?

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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. – SEPT. 29, 2010: Badgeville is recognized at the closing awards ceremony for TechCrunch Disrupt 2010. Photo by Dave Getzschman

Can customer engagement be increased through game mechanics?

Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Yelp Elite, are some of the most familiar achievements and milestones, hard-earned by our online personas. In many ways they’re basically “badges” that reflect tenure and influence across the social web. Marketers everywhere are trying to learn from and capitalize on badge-driven customer engagement.

Badgeville, an exciting new social rewards and analytics platform, launched at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, enables any website to employ fully customizable achievements — “badges” in Badgeville parlance.

The incentive to go by way of the badge? Increase customer adoption and loyalty through a social layer of game mechanics.

Casually described as “Foursquare for the web,” Badgeville’s blatant brilliance is in its simple installation. Any website owner can create site-specific badges, levels of achievement, and engineer them to specific sequences of actions taken by users on their particular site. Bespoke awards systems engineered like this can deeply affect the core user experience in three ways:

  • Focusing user attention (no longer herding cats!)
  • Incentivizing interactions (reducing user dropoff)
  • Rapid adoption of new or advanced features (stickiness!)

Badgeville currently focuses on customizing social awards experiences for individual websites, but more interesting possibilities are on the horizon that will cause data detectives and marketers to pay attention.

Badgeville’s most valuable asset is the detailed and explicit behavioral data they are capturing behind a user’s online presence and interactions. A deeper dive into this data set presents significant and certainly disruptive opportunity to advertisers. Combinations of achievements between semi-related sites could be used to suggest an online user’s preferences in other markets they have yet to explore.

The TechCrunch Disrupt audience met Badgeville’s gaming concept with high enthusiasm, but also posed questions about the platform’s longterm value in driving customer loyalty through virtual awards.

Users may eventually grow weary of the immaterial rewards of badges and higher status within an online community, but it’s become clear in today’s interaction design that smart game mechanics can be a great strategy for increasing initial use, understanding, and sharing of a web app’s most powerful features.

There’s no gaming customer loyalty though, that’s purely relative to every company’s dedication and practice of service through great support.

  • Hunter

    No question game mechanics have their place, but as you mentioned at what point will badge fatigue actually hamper the value of a service like Badgeville? Also, from a demographic perspective, the world of location and social rewards seems to be missing out on a valuable age group (35-60) that are will use these services more and more, but where game mechanics might not be as popular as the current 18-30 group….

  • Alan

    I think Blazing Saddles summed it up best…."Badges??? We dont need no stinking Badges!!"

  • http://www.badgeville.com Adena

    Thanks for the great article! I'm working with Badgeville and wanted to quickly comment on the questions brought up by this article in the comments.

    The concern about "badge fatigue" is relevant only if you implement your rewards platform poorly or focus solely on "game mechanics" without a deeper understanding of user and brand loyalty. That's why we have brought together decades of experience in game design, brand marketing and motivational psychology amongst our staff and advisers to understand exactly how loyalty and rewards can help a user experience on a brand's site, not hinder it. Additionally, while we're called "Badgeville" we offer many types of rewards – some virtual like points, badges, and trophies/status and others tangible, such as coupons and tokens that can be redeemed for items on a site, or entries into a competition.

    Hunter — you may be right that one type of badge implementation geared towards the 18-30 year old group may not be ideal for a 35-60 year old group, but one of the things that Badgeville does is make it possible for the site owner to design a rewards system that makes sense for their target audience. In some cases one implementation may make sense for any age group (everyone loves discounts, right?) and in other cases the reward experience design can be geared towards the audience that visits the site. We're working with a wide variety of web and mobile sites in publishing, retail, education, travel, and other verticals and each loyalty solution using Badgeville is unique and designed for the audience of the particular site.

    If you have any additional questions comment here and I'm happy to answer.