Adding tangible value to sales associate training with gamification is a continually accelerating trend. Gamifying learning has application across the spectrum of staff training programs including new hire onboarding, product expertise, sales skills, customer-first orientation, company branding, and more. 

Gaming elements foster better retention, motivated learners, and cohesive teams.

Online learning platforms, also referenced as eLearning, provides efficient, consistent training but by itself, often fails to supply an emotional connection to significantly improve learner self-motivation and engagement. Gamifying techniques, however, can radically enhance your employee training.

• Here are a few ways gamification has been shown to help:
• Faster transfer of knowledge
• Deeper and longer retention of knowledge
• Enhances goal-setting skills
• Increases enthusiasm to learn more through competition and collaboration
• Promotes knowledge sharing among learners

When incorporated into retail associate products and sales training correctly, gamification helps you achieve your overall goals and objectives as a manager and a brand.

Elements of Gaming

Typical gaming elements include points, rewards, credits, recognition badges, instant feedback, and increased challenges. These types of elements have shown to invoke subtle changes in brain chemistry that enhance the ability to learn new materials and skills.

Furthermore, gamification provides strong correlations between learning materials types and their efficacy:

• Reading alone is least effective but is improved with 2D visual and audio presentation.
• Requiring trainees to speak and write further enhances knowledge acquisition.
• Trainees absorb new material best through its application in real-life scenarios, which is a key component of the best gamified learning systems.

Whether gamifying traditional learning materials, providing gamified training apps, or utilizing a comprehensive online gamified training platform, the more game elements included the better. Here are a few examples:

• Frequent rewards including points, progress bars, or badges to track progress
• Achievement levels to reward completion of task sets
• A storyline that supplies context, meaning, and long-term goal attainment
• Challenges with increasing difficulty as learners progress through the story
• Hints or cues to keep learners moving when they are stuck
• Unique rewards for special efforts such as timed exercises or exploration of supplemental materials
• Team activities to support social learning and off-line discussions
• Facilitation of knowledge sharing between players or participants to encourage team interactions

Gamification in training helps drive employee engagement, improves teamwork, and provides participants with a sense of achievement.

Keep It Interesting and Accessible

Successful learning platforms that incorporate gamification techniques employ a variety of other “game-like” components to enhance training materials to keep learners engaged. Examples include:

• Storylines
• Achievement levels
• Appealing graphics
• Videos
• Actions and sounds

Other essential components necessary to create optimal learning situations for sales associates include:

• Accessible to learners anytime, anywhere, and from any device
• Micro-learning opportunities, which are particularly effective for product feature training
• Rich multimedia presentations of learning materials including concentration games, animated quizzes, videos, and more
• Continually updated information, which is critical for technology product selling

Gamification Best Practices

Two important guidelines for creating gamified training materials with punch are to make them both challenging and fun. The challenges must not invoke frustration but cannot be boringly easy either. Ample rewards plus social learning techniques will ensure the training is fun.

A productive, pleasant educational online learning experience is also enhanced via gamification best practices:

• Knowledge retention decays at a rapid, predictable rate, so reinforce it with automatically scheduled spaced repetition of material.
• The best gamified platforms provide participants with a sense of control over the learning process.
• A generous reward strategy assisted with audible and visual cues is further enhanced with public recognition of learner effort especially via tangible rewards such as product discounts.
• Remember that social learning is about collaboration as well as competition especially for team building.
• The best storylines are flexible enough that learners can traverse multiple paths to achieve the next level or the ultimate goal.
• Unfettered access to gamified learning materials, especially those that support micro-learning, lets learners personalize their training schedule while also supporting spaced repetition of information.

Achieve Better Training Results with Gamification

Whether onboarding new hires or seasonal sales staff, or ensuring your team is on top of their game in product knowledge, incorporating gamification elements into your training is a win-win.

We’ve seen firsthand the success that can be achieved when incorporating gamification into training. The Intel® Retail Edge Program has over 15 years of experience in the gamification of learning materials for improving sales associates’ expertise on the latest Intel® products and technologies.

Built upon rich, multimedia courses reinforced with the most potent gaming elements, it supplies your associates with both the product knowledge and soft skills needed to sell satisfying customer solutions. Find out more about the Intel® Retail Edge Program and how it can be a game changer for you and your store.

 

 

 

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