By clearly defining your sales goals, setting roles and clarifying expectations, and rewarding incremental progress towards achieving major milestones, the Bunchball Nitro gamification platform can help your business coordinate your strategy for managing customer relationships.
A Diversity of Incentives
The key difference between a gamification platform like Bunchball Nitro and a traditional sales contest is that Nitro provides a comprehensive and ongoing way to track every aspect of organizational performance—it recognizes the workers who consistently achieve excellence on multiple axes, not just those who single-mindedly grind away at the weekly quota.
Traditional contests often force your staff to prioritize short-term targets over long-term success. For example, when the sales team feels pressured to make a weekly call quota, they may let other tasks slide, failing to provide adequate follow through after the sale, letting unfinished deals linger in the pipeline, or leaving potential upsells on the table.
A gamification platform solves this problem by rewarding employees who are staying on top of every function of their jobs. The platform recognizes the totality of a worker’s contributions, providing incentives for the holistic excellence that will help build your strongest customer relationships.
Gamification Across the Life Cycle
Building robust relationships and long customer life cycles should be your sales team’s top priority but managing customer relationships over the years can be challenging. A carefully cultivated relationship can be derailed by miscommunication and competing priorities within your organization. Gamification can help your business coordinate incentives between departments, smoothing every stage of the customer relationship life cycle.
Gamification can break down long-term goals into immediate steps, providing instant feedback for moving along projects that would otherwise take months to show results. For example, if your goal is to create loyal repeat customers, your incentive structure needs to provide a more immediate reward to keep the team focused. Bunchball Nitro can help prioritize long-term goals by incentivizing each incremental step along the way—rewarding the team for paying attention to simple tasks like maintaining regular contact and prioritizing service requests.
From the generation of initial leads to the growth and retention of long-standing customers, your team will need a coordinated strategy. Effective cooperation is necessary if your business is to offer the best value proposition to customers at every stage of your relationship. Gamification can quantize this coordination, keeping track of the workers who reach out to strategize with colleagues, and allowing workers to give special recognition to the unsung heroes that make the plan come together.
Upending the Silo
Your customers’ needs will change over the course of your relationship; as the relationship grows, it will become more complex. As the number of stakeholders expands, incentives can begin to conflict: Your sales team may want to focus on maximizing quarterly revenues, while marketing liaisons may see long-term value in pushing for referrals to new customers. One team may be exploring the potential for branding partnerships while another is laying the groundwork to launch an integrated sales channel. Keeping everyone on the same page can get complicated, and the last thing you want is for the customer to start doubting your strategy’s coherence.
Gamification can help you develop an incentive system that enhances cooperation between all stakeholders, upending the departmental “silos” that keep teams from working together. The platform can be set up to smooth interdisciplinary handoffs across the stages of the customer relationship lifecycle, helping each team member build on top of the contributions of their colleagues and setting the stage for future success. When the initial sales contact knows they will share in the rewards for successfully cultivating a repeat customer, they will be incentivized to plan for the long term.
If employees are told to “stay in their lane”, opportunities for synergy can be missed. Bunchball Nitro can spread rewards across the organization. For example, to recognize the role of excellent technical support in customer retention, the platform can award special trophies and badges to the support staff whose attention makes customers stay.
Working for the Long Term
Gamification provides a more inclusive incentive structure that reduces interdepartmental conflict. The platform can be set up to reward employees who shift their focus away from short-term wins, giving immediate recognition to team members who are busy laying the groundwork for projects that will yield long-term value and build durable customer relationships.
Bunchball Nitro can also open the incentive structure by allowing employees to recognize one another’s cross-departmental contributions. The software platform encourages colleagues to think outside of departmental lines, recognizing the teammates that go out of their way to share valuable insights and lend a hand across the org chart.
Gamification provides the tools that will keep the team working together and build durable customer relationships. By encouraging cooperation and aligning incentives, a platform like Bunchball Nitro will help your sales team see over the horizon and work strategically to achieve long-term success.