How to Motivate Employees Using Gamification – A Practical Example in Retail

Retail chains are a highly dynamic line of business. Every week new promotions come in and new products are introduced. This requires managers to make sure front-line employees are continuously aligned selling the right things and equipped with the right knowledge. To this end, retailers can’t rely on emails or frantic WhatsApp groups for motivation and they can’t take employees off the floor for re-training every time a new product line is launched.

Managing this kind of environment effectively requires a different breed of systems. One that will streamline communications and ensure employee engagement and focus throughout, while allowing upper management insight into what’s going on in every shop’s floor.

Gameffective allows retailers to do this through a mix of smart, automated notifications, gamified activities and by empowering line managers with insights and data required to drive their teams.

Sounds complex? Not really. Here’s how it looks like in real life.

Introducing New Campaigns – Engagement Automation

Helen leads local marketing for Cell Central, a chain of mobile phones and equipment shops. Cell Central has a new promotion starting this week. It targets clients interested in flagship devices, offering them a discounted device insurance plan called FLEX. So Helen launches a campaign on Gameffective that will train sales agents in the stores on the new offering and drive them to start selling it.

Neal works in sales at the New York branch of Cell Central. At the beginning of his shift he gets a push notification on his smartphone – “Pssst… have you heard about FLEX? Click to see if it could benefit your clients”.

Neal clicks on the button in the message. It directs him to a short article about the FLEX device insurance plan.

A couple of hours later, as Neal goes into a lunch break, he gets an email message –‘Answer 3 questions about FLEX for your chance to win today’s prize’. He clicks on the link which takes him to a short quiz. This helps Neal better remember what he learned and helps Gameffective understand Neal’s level of proficiency and whether he needs more training on the program.

Neal answers all 3 questions correctly. Cool, he got a rare game card as well as 10 points for that.

Monitoring Activities – Continuous Performance Management

Hellen is monitoring how employees are doing with their training and how successful they selling FLEX. From her dashboard she can see which stores have high rates of training completion and knowledge and how this correlates to sales of the new insurance plans.

Helen sends an email to store managers where employees are either not doing their training or not selling FLEX.

Janine, the 5^th avenue store manager checks out her Team Manager Console. She is asked to evaluate her employees on their sales pitch and send them feedback. The feedback is essential for the employees so that the employees knows what their strengths and weaknesses are. This will help further their progress, set and reach goals and result in higher performance. Following this Janine decides to send an interactive task to all her team asking them to take a video of their sales pitch so that she can give them feedback.

Janine also notices that David and Cole have not done their training on FLEX. Emily completed the training a few days ago, but hasn’t sold any device insurance plans yet.

From the console, Janine uses a pre-populated email template to send David and Cole a note firmly requesting that they complete the training assignment today. She invites Emily for a 15-minute coffee break at the beginning of her shift to see what’s holding her back. Emily feels unsure about certain things in FLEX and Janine answers her questions and suggests she checks out some more relevant training materials on Gameffective.

Game ON –

Helen decides to take it up a notch. She sets up a team challenge for stores to compete over sales of FLEX this week. Winning stores will get prizes and be added to a follow up championship competitions. The next day, Neal and all his co-workers get a notification inviting them to join the challenge.

In the first few days of the campaign Neal isn’t very committed to selling FLEX. Today, he sold 5 units of iPhone X. Clients buying these are perfect candidates for the FLEX insurance program. After he records his 5^th sale, he gets a push notification – “Your Team Needs You! – Start selling FLEX’s and help your team win the challenge” The message is linked to more training materials about how to sell FLEX. This gets him focused on trying to sell the new insurance plans.

As the campaign unfolds, Neal starts checking his Team’s position on the leaderboard regularly. He sees Team Broadway is winning. Francis, a buddy of his, is working in the Broadway store today. To spice things up he sends him a personal challenge over Gameffective – “I’ll bet you 5 gold coins that I can sell 5 FLEX’s faster than you can”. Francis takes the challenge, and loses. Neal was on a roll today.

Banking on Wins

At the end of the week, Neal’s store won the challenge. Each employee is awarded 100 points. They all also get a badge added to their profile on Gameffective which is shared on Cell Central Gameffective social feed.

Just before he leaves home for the weekend, Neal notices a shopping cart icon flickering on the top of the Gameffective mobile app. It says the virtual store is open. He gained 115 points this week from the different activities. From the virtual store, he exchanges these for a $50 voucher for Netflix. Now he can finally check out the new season of “Stranger Things” everyone keeps talking about.

This has been an awesome week!

At Gameffective our platform provides a digital motivation and engagement layer that helps align employees with company goals, drive sales and create meaningful training and performance interactions for employees and managers.

To learn more and see if our digital engagement platform could be right for you, please contact us to set a free consultative meeting with one of our specialist consultants.