"Gamification" needs to take a back seat to customer success

“Gamification” is a decent tactic, but it fails to meet customer objectives in both customer engagement and customer success. Companies need to emphasize their customers’ priorities and real needs. This episode illustrates the problem using the example of a Grammarly email.

I appreciate the Grammarly plugin. I’m a decent writer, but everybody can use a tip now and again. But there’s one thing about Grammarly I don’t like. Their little green doohickey keeps putting itself right where I want to put my cursor. It gets in the way – especially when I’m filling out a form, or something like that. It got so annoying that I just logged out. It wasn’t worth it.

Grammarly noticed this after a week and sent me an email. Now you might think the email would ask “what the heck?” or “is anything wrong?” or something like that. Nope. It just assumed (1) I was taking a break from writing, or (2) I had accidentally logged out.

There’s a self-awareness problem going on here.

That got me thinking about the differences between customer engagement and customer success, so I asked ChatGPT to tell me the difference. Here’s my slightly edited version of the list I got.

Customer Engagement includes …
Dialogue and building a rapport with customers,
Feedback, reviews, and suggestions,
Personalization, and
Brand loyalty.

Customer Success includes …
Onboarding,
Training and support,
Regularly assessing customer satisfaction, and
Aligning the product’s capabilities and how it’s used with the customer’s objectives.

According to ChatGPT, “customer engagement” focuses on creating a strong connection between the customer and the brand, while “customer success” is more directed towards ensuring customers are meeting their goals.

The labels don’t matter. I would say there are three important things here.

It’s not about you, or your brand, or checking off all the boxes on a list of tasks. It’s about ensuring that your product is helping your customer do what he needs to do.
In order to do that, you have to think outside the constraints of your discipline, or whatever model your company is using to measure and manage engagement,
Customer Success people should learn from Customer Engagement people, and vice versa.

Let’s apply this to the email I got from Grammarly. I’m going to read you the opening paragraph.

We're not seeing any writing activity for you last week, so unless you were taking a writing break, you might have accidentally logged out. Please log back in so we can keep you up to date on your personal records and general greatness.

That sounds like an email from somebody who’s bought into gamification. What’s important – from that point of view – is that I keep up my streak. My “personal records” and such.

In fact, right after that paragraph is my “Grammarly writing streak,” with my “next achievement.” Whatever the heck that is.

Then there are some charts showing a bunch of metrics I don’t care about at all.

All I want to know is whether I need to put a comma here.

Somebody at Grammarly has narrowed the concept of customer engagement down to this gamification thing. Don’t blame them. They probably learned that at a marketing conference. But gamification has absolutely nothing to do with why I use the service.

I realize gamification is a powerful tool in some settings. But gamification helps the company get the user addicted to a certain behavior.

Here’s the question you need to ask. Is the behavior you’re tricking a person into in their interest, consistent with their goals, or is it only in the company’s interest?