Gamification in Restaurants Series- Part 1
Imagine for a second what life would be if it were a game – getting points for sleeping eight hours, or leveling up after doing four loads of laundry, or earning rewards for cooking your own meal seven days in a row! That is simply gamification.
While the use of mobile apps is widespread, users have more than 80 apps installed on their phones, but only use 9 on average per day and 56% of these users uninstall apps within 7 days of installation.
As these numbers suggest, user engagement with mobile apps is volatile. Therefore, one of the most important challenges faced by organizations operating these applications is to keep the user engaged. But guess what! Gamification is one solution.
In this series, I will tell you about the concept of gamification and how important it is in driving customer engagement. In my next series, it will be more about adopting gamification as a strategy within a restaurant.
What is Gamification
Gamification is the process of using game mechanics, elements, and principles and applying them to non-game contexts to engage users better.
Gamification involves turning an everyday activity – like visiting a restaurant – into a game, and like any other game, participants earn rewards for completing different activities. From points to badges, to level-ups or even a VIP status; gamification applies all these kinds of play-based incentives to non-game environments to reward people for participating. The idea is that gamification turns something as ordinary as enjoying a meal, into an activity that is engaging, fun, and a win-win for everyone involved.
Gamification taps into basic psychological principles like the attraction to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards are personal successes that originate from within you (such as completing tasks, personal development, recognition, status). Extrinsic rewards are correlated to the external recognition of your value (loyalty points, gift cards, money, merchandise, discounts).
Extrinsic motivation is attractive in the short-term, because it includes superficial gains such as money, but intrinsic motivation is ultimately more satisfying for us, because it creates genuine happiness, satisfying our basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and personal development.
Gamification uses both, giving you both the satisfaction of progressing within the ‘game’ while also giving you tangible benefits such as discounts or promotions.
Why You Should Consider Adopting Gamification Strategies
Who doesn’t want a free dessert! Keep in mind there are benefits you will achieve from encompassing gamification techniques into your restaurant:
1. Build Brand Awareness
Building a strong brand is an important part of staying top of mind with your customers and the faster your customers recognize your restaurant – whether online or in-person – the better the chances are that they will bring their business to you instead of your competitors. Creating a restaurant loyalty program with gamification rewards is an excellent way to boost your brand’s image and make an impression on your guests. KOINZ, for example, can help you create a digital loyalty program by allowing customers to collect points by providing their phone number! Pretty easy, yes? The more they spend, the more points they get and higher chances of redeeming more gifts.
2. Drive Loyalty
Remember no matter how diverse your menu is, your customers have more options than ever for spending their hard-earned cash. Therefore, you need to be wowing your customers for choosing your restaurant so that you can drive restaurant customer loyalty. 70% of customers will make a purchase based on whether the business they’re buying from offers a reward program, which highlights how important incentives are for building loyalty.
3. Boost Engagement
With loyalty gamification, your guests are encouraged more to dine with you and refer others to your restaurant loyalty program – all for the sake of leveling up.
4. Increase Amount of Customer Spending
Gamification loyalty programs are your highway to increase in revenues. On average, customers spend 67% more in the second year of their relationship with a business than they do in the first 6 months.
Now with all these benefits yielded out of adopting gamification, did you know that Foodics’ CRM can catalyze achieving these benefits? You can design your own loyalty program to encourage customers to continue to shop at your restaurant.
The mentioned benefits are great and all, but you must be wondering how to apply gamification to your restaurant. In my next article, I will give you a deeper dive into how to adopt different gamification strategies to increase your sales via high customer engagement and foster higher employee loyalty. Stay tuned!
