What if price mattered less to the utility ratepayer than winning?
That’s the promise of “gamification,” the product and programming trend that has driven Internet success stories like Foursquare or Instagram. At first it can be hard to see how “check-ins” and other forms of social sharing can play a role in businesses like the power sector, but as utilities engage more with their customers through smart grids and rely on their input for outage notifications and servicing, finding new ways to obtain customers and keep them is an increasingly high priority.
Recent statistics around engagement of customers using gamification strategies are compelling for both marketers and for compliance-oriented managers like those at utilities. When combined with the addictive quality of mobile technology – statistics show many smartphone owners check their devices roughly every ten minutes in a day – users of platforms with game-like design and product qualities are the kind of power-user customers all businesses seek to engage with in a data-driven operating environment.
One of the most influential voices in the space is Gabe Zichermann, who is a startup veteran and consults for a wide range of companies in addition to writing extensively about gamification.
Zichermann hosts a wide variety of gamification resources on his web site here, and in a recent New York talk discussed the importance of signals other than price for companies seeking to obtain and retain customers in the new technology-driven and distributed economy power companies are grappling with.
Status, access and power can all be replacements for “stuff” (where stuff also includes discounts) in a marketplace, Zichermann says. Customers have become habituated to discounts and free stuff, and to price competition, he points out, a psychological insight that echoes the resistance of power ratepayers to rising costs or premiums for renewable energy and energy efficiency investments. It is often more profitable for companies to find ways to give customers status, access or power rewards through “game-like” platforms than to race to the bottom on price, he says.
In a utility industry under pressure to meet more than a trillion dollars in investment needs over the course of the coming decade, the appeal of finding ways to increase the acceptability of higher electricity bills is obvious.
For much more on gamification visit Zichermann’s website here.
