Last weeks’ Browser Games Forum 2011 in Frankfurt / Offenbach was a great opportunity to get in touch with the elite of Germany’s game industry. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to attend.
Besides of many interesting meetings, I was also quite intrigued by the skilled blending of powerful management theories and games. I didn’t hear the term gamification once and official as well as private talks were mostly around how to best listen and engage with your customers and improving the service to them.

Level 1

In browser games, forums are provided by the game creator so that they have a direct channel and metrics from the customer base. Through this they are able to identify leaders, influencers and generally non-monetary metrics which are important for long term success. For example who goes through great efforts to mediate when there are issues in the community, who provides tools, mods and so on?

Guilds take this method to the next level. Here you give the community a tool to organize into hierarchical sub-groups which makes it easier to manage them:

• Guilds attract like-minded people. As a result, the user group is more homogenous and provides a greater sense of belonging. Also, social interaction is easier among people with same values
  –>  the game becomes stickier

• Guilds can provide focused feedback through the Gilds’ leadership

These are some of the most sophisticated methods for loyalty management and channeling of customer feedback directly back into the company. Some take this to the next level by giving community managers the final say on shipment of patches and updates instead of QA. If this “isn’t a good moment” they may delay e.g. a patch for several weeks to make sure the community is ready for it.

Best practice is to measure the community managers based on the health of the community. They should not be held accountable for monetary metrics such as active to paid users conversion rates because this creates conflicting priorities. There is a clear correlation between engagement of the customers and their corresponding life time i.e. someone who posts hangs around for longer.  Appropriate metrics are more in line of conversion of registered users to active members which have conversations.

Leveling up

It’s a well known fact in inbound and content based marketing that modern web sites should make sharing easy. People are social by nature and all you need to to is to give them the right tools. Within gaming this is taken a little further. Here, best practice is to include little incentives which help you progress a little or make the game more fun when you invite your friends.

Unfortunately, every game has its life time, too. But since you learned a lot about the customer during that game, it can be quite advantageous to manage the end of game experience as well.
The means you need to have other offers and you need to correlate data across products and find which users are like other tools. It’s important to undertake this analysis on the basis of cohorts because preferences can actually differ over time, customer acquisition channel, playing habits, etc. One approach which was discussed here was for example to create several strategy games. However, in this case you need to be careful about cannibalization effects.
On the other hand one speaker revealed that the most favorite alternative game of World of Warcraft players is apparently GTA. Looking backwards you can find several reasons for that such as both are block buster, GTA could be a nice change after some hours of MMORPGs. I would suggest to always measure and develop “user retirement” over time based on data and community feedback.

In summary, most industries can learn a great deal from the gaming industry when it comes to understanding and engaging with customers as well as loyalty management. They are a poster child when it comes to working with instead of against customers.