How Gamification Helps Create Immersive and Engaging Virtual Assistant Experiences

More and more companies are bringing elements of gamification – using psychological triggers to boost player engagement and retention – to their marketing strategy. Virtual assistants are a natural way to bring gamification to your brand strategy.

The benefits of virtual assistants are increasingly well-recognised in marketing and beyond, with advantages that include saving both time and resources by optimising operational processes and automating key tasks, alongside creating positive customer experiences.

But the benefits of virtual assistants go far beyond sheer efficiency: they also provide a high degree of entertainment value, ultimately boosting brand loyalty by making the sales process fun and an all-around positive experience.

More and more companies are bringing elements of gamification – using psychological triggers to boost player engagement and retention – to their marketing strategy. Read on to find out how!

Creating Immersive Experiences With Virtual Assistants

In this day and age, buyers are bombarded with promotional messages to the point where “ad fatigue” is becoming a real issue for the marketing industry. And while there have never been so many platforms through which to reach out to consumers (social media, email, search, messaging apps, and even traditional press, to cite but a few), an increasingly competitive consumer landscape means that in order to gain attention from buyers, companies are having to offer ever-more engaging and creative customer journeys.

One way to do this is to provide customers with immersive, personalised experiences that truly speak to them. Virtual assistants have the major advantage of integrating with people’s favorite messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Viber, thus providing them with all the information they need at their fingertips.

The possibility of interacting with customers through the platforms they know and use every day is in itself a huge advantage. All the more so when you throw powerful analytics into the mix, thus providing marketers with valuable insights on what their customers like to engage with through relevant demographic, geographic, and behavioral data. At a fraction of the cost of a fully-fledged customer service team, virtual assistants give customers the impression of being truly taken care of.

Incorporating Game Design into Your Virtual Assistant

Play comes naturally to humans, who use it to develop their cognitive and social skills from an early age through common games such as hide and seek. Video game developers quickly realised that it was possible to capture and retain the attention of users at unprecedented levels by using innate psychological triggers. Gamification has since become the subject of intense research focusing on how game design can be applied to various aspects of our day-to-day lives.

Marketing strategies can incorporate several different degrees of gamification. More sophisticated systems include points systems and loyalty programmes as well as a competitive aspect that incites the user to compete with friends for a higher score. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can incorporate game design into your virtual assistant:

A points system

Many platforms, including Facebook Messenger, allow you to implement a system in which users are rewarded with points for each click. This is the first step towards encouraging users to regularly interact with your bot; the more they interact with your bot, the more points they earn for themselves, where these accumulated points can be exchanged for some form of tangible or intangible reward in return.

Reminders

If you’ve ever played any form of mobile games, you would have received notification reminders to re-engage you after a period of inactivity. A similar approach can be applied to your virtual assistant design, in which your bot can remind users to make recurring purchases for necessities and sundries. This is especially useful for industries where purchases are made at regular intervals, think personal care items like contact lenses, shampoo/body wash and tooth paste.

Badges and titles

Once the user has gained a certain amount of points, you can award them a fun title or badge to add to their profile, thus creating a sense of reinforcement that incites them to continue engaging with your virtual assistant.

Prizes

The next step can be rewarding the user with small prizes, such as a discount code or access to premium content. This is a real incentive for the user to continue interacting with your virtual assistant while at the same time deepening their relationship with your brand and moving them towards a purchase.

Leader Boards

People are naturally incited by competition – either with themselves or others. Take a leaf out of popular language-learning app Duolingo’s book through leader boards that allow them to see how they score compared to their friends and how they’ve progressed over time.

Challenges

Challenges (“30-day streak”, for example) are a fun and effective way to boost engagement by encouraging users to work towards a certain goal.

Surprise users with random, mystery content

Boost engagement by “teasing” special prizes and offers to come, such as discount codes, future challenges and exclusive content. One way of keeping things fresh and exciting for users is to serve up new, random content each time they interact with your bot.

Brand Loyalty Through Virtual Assistants: Making it Work For Your Company

As we’ve seen, a well-thought-out gamification plan is a great way to boost all-around customer engagement. You must prepare a strategy to avoid appearing “gimmicky” and ensure your efforts pay off. Consider the following points when implementing gamification principles into your virtual assistant.

Your objectives: consider the end goals of your new strategy and the outcomes you wish to see. At the same time, establish how you will measure those results and which metrics and KPIs you will use to do so.

Your audience: for your gamification efforts to resonate with your base, you have to know what kind of content they are most likely to engage with. Getting to know your audience is key: yet again, strong analytics are essential here.

Your story: novels, films, TV shows and video games all need a strong plot, and interactive online content is no different. Your company’s brand voice should be woven into a story that keeps users coming back for the next instalment.

 Your social presence: Virtual assistants’ ability to seamlessly integrate users’ favorite social media platforms is a godsend for marketers. Social-friendly game design elements such as badges and leaderboards enable people to share their brand experience, effectively helping create a community around your company.

Closing Words

Consumers are increasingly turning their backs on companies just seeking to sell them “stuff” and looking towards those that offer them truly valuable experiences. A virtual assistant that streamlines the customer journey is already a great way to do that – one that is entertaining and captivating is even better.

Find out what makes KeyReply’s virtual assistants an immersive and engaging experience for your customers. Ask us for a quick demo today.