A Beginner’s Guide To Leveraging Brand Touchpoints With Gamification As Part Of An Ongoing Customer Experience

Brand touchpoints give you the opportunity to interact with your customers and have them engage with your brand. Are you maximizing these opportunities or missing the chance to double down on positive customer experience? Gamification could be the missing link in your customer loyalty pipeline.

Are Your Customers a One-Way Ticket or Round Trip?

Every brand identifies touchpoints in a different way. However, all touchpoints can be shuffled into one of three categories:

Pre-purchase: All the interactions between brand and customer before the sale is made, including information gathering (including use of a knowledge base or automated chatbot), queries, requests for a price quote, consultations and demonstrations.

Purchase: The interactions of the brand with the customer during the sale, including laying out terms, upselling and cross-selling, discussions of subscriptions or automatic renewals, perks and introduction to a rewards program app.

Post-purchase: All the interactions between brand and customer after the sale has happened, including customer service, customer assistance, loyalty and rewards program interactions, repeat sales and referral/brand ambassador opportunities.

Many brands see this as a beginning-to-end linear journey that starts with pre-sales and ends at purchase, with a code of post-purchase interaction that may or may not happen.

This is a mistake. For optimal brand stickiness and customer retention, the customer journey should be cyclical, going from pre-sales to sale to post-sales and seamlessly entering the presales segment again.

• Generating leads
• Acquiring high-value customers
• Converting one-time buyers to two-time buyers
• Driving repeat category purchases
• Reengaging disconnected customers
• Reactivating lapsed customers
• Conducting post-purchase surveys

Your customer loyalty program should cycle your customer right back to step one over and over.

Are You Targeting Or Using a Scatter Approach?

Many brand experiences are irregular, disconnected and fragmented.

Pre-sales touchpoints via offline channels such as direct mail, TV or radio advertising, or billboard usage, may be missing out on the opportunities provided by mobile-first contact. Purchasing may not be leveraged at all — a mistake since POS is actually one of the best times to drive the customer toward the next touchpoint.

Post-sales touchpoints may be sporadic and dependent on the customer reaching out, a reactive instead of proactive approach. McKinsey notes that some organizations have increased revenues by 30% or more by being proactive and reaching out to fulfill customer needs with the right offering at the right time.

Gamification can bridge the gap between touchpoints by creating an ongoing customer experience that doesn’t end just because of a purchase or reward redemption. It can also increase the number of touchpoints in each engagement segment to create a holistic customer journey underpinned by a seamless digital experience.

Are You Using a Can and String or Mobile to Reach Your Customers?

The importance, impact and significance of continuous mobile-first engagement cannot be overrated. Each digital experience allows customers to interact with you in real time, and is an opportunity to leverage your brand touchpoint and lay groundwork for the next engagement.

Mobile users are the ideal target market for a robust rewards program app. In January 2021, there were a reported 5.22 billion unique mobile users, making up 66.6% of the global population — an increase of more than 13% YoY.

Gamification fits perfectly into the natural inclinations of mobile users, meeting them in their environment of choice, feeding their need for instant gratification,  and engaging them in exactly what they enjoy most. Mobile users spend nearly a third of their time on mobile devices playing games.

One out of four mobile apps are gaming apps, far ahead of the second place category, which is business apps (accounting for around one of ten apps.) If your company can bridge the gap between business and gaming, your app can become part of your customers’ daily lifestyle, something they check as naturally and frequently as they do Facebook or their email account.

Let’s Play a Phone Game: StarHub Case Study

Brands can improve customer loyalty and retention through the art of gamification. Perx partnered with a large telco and proved exactly how impactful our lifestyle marketing platform powered by gamification could be when it came to leveraging brand touchpoints for a never-ending customer experience journey.

Telco StarHub’s focus shifted from chasing customer loyalty to driving a change in customer behavior, pushing them to actively engage with the brand and its offering. The MyStarHub app, developed in partnership with Perx, combined both needs and wants of the customer by launching weekly recurring campaigns, powered by gamification mechanics and tactics.

This allowed the brand to stand out with continuous customer experiences in an era of sporadic and reactive customer-brand interactions, improving brand interaction and customer-stickiness. The in-app experience carried forward the tiered setup of the best traditional customer loyalty programs, and added new touchpoints and experiences for customers to engage with.

By pairing customer actions with instant rewards throughout a continuing gamified user journey, StarHub was able to benefit through reward redemption rates that easily exceeded earlier benchmarks, and easily superseded their own goal for customer adoption, which was set at 10% in the first 30 days:

• 30 days: 20% adoption
• 6 months: 40% adoption
• 8 months: nearly 50% adoption

90,000 rewards were redeemed monthly, reaching a total of 1.1 million by the end of the first 8 months. StarHub saw an increase of 25% in Monthly Active users post the launch of the powered loyalty program, as well as an 11% increase in new customer acquisition and a 6% YoY improvement in customer retention. Moreover, onboarded households interact with the telco’s app an average of 43 additional times compared to those not yet onboarded.

Interested in learning more about how the StarHub lifestyle, gamification and rewards program app powered by Perx boosted the telco to new heights of customer loyalty and engagement? Download the case study.

Want to know how Perx can elevate your own brand and empower your customers to join, participate in, and benefit from your rewards program app while driving revenues? Request a free demo from a customer experience specialist today.