Raise your hand for those of you who know that Minesweeper, Solitaire, Hearts, and FreeCell had a completely different purpose other than pure entertainment — to incentivize user behavior.
While these games caused massive amounts of lost working hours wherever there was a PC with Win OS since 1990, their real goal was to stealthily teach players mouse-fluency.
Without realizing it, by playing those fancy games, newly minted PC users were learning how to drag and drop instead of utilizing command-line input.
And it worked so well that we are still using these features today and not only on computers.
This example provides the precedent that gamification in business has its benefits and is more than capable of serving its thickly veiled purpose.
Over time, it’s been embraced by various industries to come up with new techniques to engage users in a more comprehensive manner — by introducing fun into not-so-friendly or complex concepts.
Wherever there is a considerable gap between ordinary Joe and novel technology and its inner workings, gamification presents a beneficial way of bridging that gap and building the foundation that will help in the long run.
By its mere nature, blockchain is in the perfect position to benefit the average user via its ability to provide secure record-keeping and enable transparent crypto transactions.
This is why new channels of exploiting the enormous potential brought on by games based on blockchain are being rapidly established across a wide variety of marketing, user acquisition, and customer engagement activities.
By bringing back people’s faith in gaming, blockchain provides a solid support system for incentivizing user behavior in a manner that can be utilized by business-savvy brands that are ready to modernize the way they are interacting with their customer base.
Here are some of the examples of successful gamification use cases for business purposes.
Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are often accused of being unfair to customers or focused on maximizing profits as they are arguably based on biased rules. When companies aim to incentivize user behavior inadequately — by grinding down the margins — customers are often left without adequately satisfactory rewards.
However, unfair dealings of this sort can be prevented via the transparency of blockchain technology. Applying smart contracts provides a bulletproof monitoring mechanism able to point out inappropriate company goals and abusive intentions by malicious participants.
Flexibility and System Decentralization
Loyalty programs that adopt cryptocurrency experience greater flexibility in terms of handling reward programs. Instead of restricting loyalty points for specific purposes and having redemption policies limited to their respective businesses, implementing gamification in blockchain allows companies to adopt universal tokens.
They, in turn, not only permit easier trade-off between different currencies — be it crypto or fiat — but also provide more choices in terms of the rewards available to the users.
Cryptocurrencies have value that goes beyond one brand and, in time, users’ ability to spend them how they please may result in a loyalty coin economy that brings an even higher increase in value on its own.
By using a universal cryptocurrency across several brands, the entire loyalty system becomes decentralized and thus more accessible to all users.
Blockchain-based gamification techniques, therefore, reflect the basic DeFi features on the entire user experience. By the same token, it becomes easier to run and track loyalty campaigns, save time, and add more value to the participants.
Digital Asset Ownership
Rewarding certain types of user behavior is the established way of keeping customer interactions and retention at a high level and shaping them to be advantageous for particular business models.
Games based on blockchain have become the prime example of the use of digital assets as a form of reward.
Not only does the technology provide secure markets for acquiring and trading such assets, but also for connecting to other sectors that wish to boost their market capitalization in an innovative way.
AIKON’s new partner Bountyblok is also part of this trend with the mission to reimagine the gamification concept built it using blockchain technology.
Their version of introducing gamification to all sorts of industries is simple but effective — create a challenge, define some rules, and earn achievements. Successfully finished Bounties, as they are called in the blockchain space, can lead to crypto earnings, but also other types of rewards.
Combined with AIKON’s solutions ORE ID and ORE Protocol, it allows companies to utilize the full might of blockchain technology and keep user personal information secure.
The future is here and we couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Bountyblok to the AIKON family.
Incentivizing user behavior safely and transparently has never been easier!
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About AIKON
AIKON, a San Francisco-based VC backed firm, was founded in 2017 with the goal of enabling the digital asset economy and empowering users from all over the globe by securing their personal information via blockchain.
AIKON has developed the Open Rights Exchange (ORE) protocols to manage access to digital rights and access, and has been enabling mainstream blockchain adoption with its ORE ID secure identity service. With ORE ID, AIKON aims to foster a new era of secure identities that protects users and their data, powered by the blockchain.Visit the website or connect with us on Telegram!