Using Space Designer 3D to gamify your online user experience

Space Designer 3D is taking an innovative approach to the online floor planning and architecture industry.

Our innovation?

3D visualization and online interaction to gamify the online user experience. How does gamification drive loyalty, increase sales and engage your retail customers? Let us tell you.

Gamification as part of your overall business strategy

Gamification is not, in fact, all fun and games. Gamification is a business decision that must be implemented in conjunction with your overall business strategy.

Creating an online experience requires a strategic shift, based on an investigation of the current state of your customer’s journey.

How are your current customers handling their online journey?

Once you’ve mapped out their journey, you will be able to determine which part of their journey needs to be reevaluated, how, and what for.

Why gamification?

First things first. What is gamification?

It’s bringing gameplay into a concept that wasn’t originally built for gameplay.

Gamification is creating a system that relies on our instinct to compete. Humans want to win : we collect endless amounts of stamp cards for our next free drink, we enter lotos, hoping to be the one who will become millionaires… So why gamify the user experience?

Because by transforming your users into players, you engage their instinct to win- and therefore to interact with your product or service.

What are the benefits of creating an online user experience?

The profits are, simply put, endless. Customer engagement, interaction, which leads to client retention, data gathering, positive experiences, rewards which encourage loyalty, brand awareness…

Let’s take a walk.

Customer engagement

Establishing a connection with your audience, encouraging them to take action, even without any employee around to motivate them, can only be done via gamification.

According to Gallup, your fully engaged customers represent a 23% share of profitability, revenue and relationship growth compared to your average customer.

So you want your customers to be engaging with your product.

And perhaps you are advertising, and doing everything that you should. But you are passively advertising. You are telling people about your product, and showcasing your service, but are you asking them to take part in it?

Give them something to interact with while they’re browsing your website.

Give them a game to play.

A study of 88,000 adults conducted by the MEMES Center at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management found that 50 percent of Americans are now regular gamers and have started expecting game-like experiences when interacting with brands.

Technology in-store

Tech is everywhere. Your own clients are likely engaging with other brands on Instagram or Snapchat while browsing your online store.

So how do you keep them engaged with you?

Simple. Give your customers a technology that responds to a need they didn’t know they had. Give them a tool to visualize your products or services in 3D and allow them to interact with it, all throughout their online experience.

Remember that having active participants will help people remember your brand. This idea is older than Confucius (ca 2500 years old) who wrote “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

We remember this from school, don’t we? A teacher that speaks at us instead of with us. A much more effective component to our learning experience would be a teacher who uses case studies and interaction to grab our attention.

Edgar Dale in the 1960s created a well-known model to explain the effects of different learning styles, which suggests that experiential learning is far more powerful than reading a book or listening to a lecture.

“Gamification is a great tool for identifying those who stand out from the pack and considering those who move forward,” said Michaël Bentolila, CEO & co-founder of InsideBoard, at the How to Promote a Positive Transformation Approach

Data gathering

How do you gather data about the needs and interests of your customers? With Space Designer 3D, your online customers must first sign up, giving away precious data that can allow you to determine a user map and better target your ads and campaigns.

Positive customer experiences

Creating interaction can make customers feel more favourable towards your brand. Providing a gamified online experience is a smart way to build on your reputation as a forward-thinking store.

The strength of gamified experiences is that your customers willingly choose to interact. Gamified experiences use the language of play to draw people in.

Rewards

Consumers increasingly want engagement and the chance of being rewarded would increase their willingness to interact.

Gamification helps create a satisfying experience for customers, which leads to happy customers.

The Bottom Line

Consumers have high expectations when it comes to their experience with your brand. But gamification shouldn’t just be tacked onto your existing customer experience.

You have to consider the customer journey as a whole, and identify areas that could be improved. Use gamification strategically to make those experiences enjoyable, simple, and convenient.

Improving your customer experience may not be simple. But the reality is having an excellent customer experience is no longer a nice ‘add on’.

It’s not an extra benefit.

It’s not ‘nice to have if you can.

It’s the only option if you want to capture and sustain market share.