P.S: As you play the game, pay attention to your insurance choices. It can affect the outcomes of the Wheel of Bummers and impact your total money. Best of luck!

Key takeaways from Bummer!

In this game, you had to undergo three types of insurance – pet, rental, auto, and then all 3 combined. The purpose of insurance is to provide you with financial protection against possible risks. In Bummer!, the risk is generated by the Wheel of Bummers. The key takeaway will be the importance of paying the highest premiums and buying as many ‘Add Ons’ as you can afford. This will keep you protected against many financial risks.

What is this trend?

It’s called Gamification! Among the many changes and innovations happening in the insurance industry today, gamification is surely an interesting one. It is serving as a powerful lever for insurers seeking to enrich digital experiences and adopt new customer-centric business models.

It has become the new normal in all industries today, ranging from healthcare, fitness and nutrition, and of course insurance.

Want to play another game? It’s time to pretend you’re an adolescent and log in here to play the “Re-Mission”. A game series created by HopeLab, it helps children understand what’s going on in their bodies and how the treatments help them destroy the nasty virus.

And the result?

These games improved the treatment adherence rates, and also increased the patients’ confidence that the disease can be defeated.

Watch the video here to see the testimonial of a cancer patient. The game helped him to gain a greater sense of empowerment against the deadly disease.

What is gamification?

Gamification is the application of game elements and techniques in non-game situations. It uses point scoring, competition with others, and scorekeeping etc to attract customers. Its objective is typically to influence the behaviour of consumers who participate in the “game” and promote increased engagement.

Why gamification matters to insurance companies?

Within insurance, gamification has a number of effective use cases:

Engage customers: Gamification can transform ordinary applications into interesting and fun experiences that keep users coming back.
Establish or strengthen brands: Gamification can boost brand awareness, affinity and penetration, as well as purchase intent.
Motivate people to act: Gamification has proved to influence and even change behaviours in areas such as health and wellness, safe driving, wealth management and financial planning, and sustainability — all areas where people express a strong intention to act without actually acting.
Simplify complex insurance products: Many customers will find it difficult to understand certain types of insurance policies. This can be broken down easily using games.

How gamification can be better than traditional methods

Would you prefer to go meet an insurance agent who will take two hours of your time to explain insurance policy fit for you or rather play a game like Bummer and figure it out yourself? Well, we know the answer!

In many ways, gamification reaps a lot more benefits than traditional methods. Here are some:

Increased communication with insurance companies: According to recent EY research, 44% of customers have had no interactions with their insurers during the last 18 months. This can be tackled by gamification as it can help mitigate these trends and help insurers engage with potential customers more frequently. For example, UnitedHealthcare insurance teamed with Qualcomm to create a mobile health app dubbed UnitedHealthcare Motion that aims to boost wellness by linking financial incentives with the use of wearable devices. The goal is to help UnitedHealthcare plan participants enrolled in high-deductible health plans improve their health and save money by encouraging daily walking.

Information: implementation of gamification not only puts the power of instant access to information at the hands of the consumers, but also aids insurers to build more accurate consumer and user profiles.

Imbue interest in millennials: According to a survey conducted by insurance specialists at IBM iX, 46% cited confusion around policy specifics, and 23% blamed hurdles involved in procuring a policy such as the paperwork involved. Take a cue on how American Family Insurance simplified this process – they collaborated with WildTangent and Mindshare Entertainment to develop its ‘iAMFAM’ game which allows users to create avatars and manage activities such as buying a house and planning a career. The game then helps users decide which insurance to purchase at what point in time. Therefore, using a simple, and more appealing digital product like gamification is the key to woo younger consumers.

A quick look at the stats

Gamification is already a much larger space. It’s valued at $12 billion currently and predicted to grow 30% annually to hit $31 billion by 2024 (stats from economictimes.com)

Data source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

Furthermore, the younger population living in this digitalized world is demanding a revolution in the insurance industry as well. Take a quick look at the numbers that emphasis this:

79% of consumers plan to use a digital channel for insurance interactions (though, nearly 50% of insurers don’t have a plan for their digital transition).

66% would share significant data for personalized services to prevent injury and loss.

How gamification stimulates our human brain

Did you know? Research suggests that playing video games can increase dopamine levels in the brain by up to 100%. The human brain rewards players by flushing dopamine when they do well in a video game.

This image from Bunchball shows a simple table that matches up game mechanics (points, levels, challenges, etc.) with human desires for gameplay. Each of the mechanics trigger a primary human desire and also impacts an ancillary area as well. The orange dots signify the primary desire a particular game mechanic fulfills and the blue dots show the other areas it affects.

From this image, it is clear that our human desires and psychology plays a big role in the design of game mechanics.

Top insurance companies who got results with gamification

The one question that rocks the insurance world would be “Millennials, what will it take for you to buy an insurance policy?”

Well, top insurance companies have hit the jackpot by going the ‘gamification’ way.

An insurance company called YuLife noticed that most life insurers faded into the background after they sold a plan. The effect was leading people to lose sight of why they bought insurance and abandon their plans prematurely. So YuLife teamed up with King Digital Entertainment, the makers of Candy Crush Saga, to turn its life-insurance product into a game—and just like that, they had created a life-insurance metaverse. The company has 400,000 customers, and one in three who have downloaded the app opens it every day. Most users also earn about £10 a month in vouchers.

Aviva launched a mobile app called the ‘Aviva Drive’ which is the new easy way to save money on Aviva car insurance. The app uses smartphone technology to record a motorist’s driving style – covering their acceleration, braking, and cornering. At 200 miles, the app provides the motorist an individual driving score, which can be used to calculate any personalized discount the motorist had earned – up to 20% off their Aviva premium. The discounts are in addition to any other Aviva offers for which they are eligible.

Watch the video to see how it works.

Try Interactive Video

Games aren’t the only way to engage your customers – there are also interactive videos that will help you keep them interested in your product/service.

Watch the video to experience it now.

Watch video here

Interactive video delivers personalized content to the customer. Not only that, the customer has the opportunity to respond to the video and are prescribed ways to enrich the communication between the company and the customer. Content delivered in this way addresses the particular concerns of the customer. This will make the customer more invested in the content and, therefore, it is more likely to stimulate a response.
Did you know? According to HapYak, the click through rate for interactive video was 10x that of a YouTube video ad (based on 13.35 million interactive video views).

How interactive videos can help customers

Customers are able to input data to tailor the information that is displayed or communicated.
Layering of content can be designed so the videos shown depending on what options the customer chooses at set points.
The customer can be presented with questionnaires in order to achieve a personalised solution at the end of the video.
Customers can also submit questions, or leave comments for the customer service agents to respond to.
Customers can submit videos in the form of testimonials, adding authenticity to reviews and emphasising the relationship focus of the organisation.

What you should include while designing a game

It is important to recognize how gamification influences behaviour. To be effective, game experiences must be fun and motivating, which encourages engagement and fulfillment. Typically, gamified activities rely on three basic components of motivation:

Autonomy: giving users or “players” a sense of being in charge so they stick to their goals
Value: motivating players with an appealing reward that is relevant to the specific individual
Competence: encouraging users to keep playing by allowing them to get better at the game

Also to boost motivation, the game should provide two factors:

Extrinsic motivation – Such as perks, benefits, discounts, or badges. For example Starbucks has an app called Foursquare, a location-based app, where people compete to check in more often and get recognition with badges such as “Mayor.” Games mechanics like providing recognition for achievements and facilitating competition makes the game interesting and popular.
Intrinsic rewards – The game should have elements of self-development and self-interest. For this, we can take the example of the Bummer! It educates us on the importance of insurance, and nudges us to take the policy.

Conclusion

Gamification delivers proven and tangible results. By applying it into the product, businesses can experience an increase in engagement across social media and website traffic generated. It will also help customers understand the true need for the right policies. Overall, it can help increase brand awareness, loyalty and finally, to purchase the insurance prospects.

Indhu Abraham