It’s no secret that the insurance industry has a reputation of being boring. Whether accurate or not, there is certainly room for improvement in regards to motivating agents and providing a livelier workplace with more engaging tasks. Enter gamification.
You have probably heard of gamification before, as it is becoming increasingly popular across many industries and workplaces. Gamification is “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation.” It is effective in making sales more engaging and more fun–thus it is a brilliant feature to introduce to insurance agencies.
The primary goal of gamification for enterprise is to increase activity on clearly defined performance metrics (KPIs) by providing a clear path to mastery. With each key task completed, users receive updates, awards, and a chance to take the top spot in leaderboard rankings. This, of course, makes it a very powerful tool to motivate highly competitive insurance sales agents.
Making insurance fun through gamification
“90% of employees are more productive when they use gamification.”
According to many insurance agencies, their agents’ daily tasks are often repetitive, dull and lacking in variety. As a result, agents are perpetually unmotivated and disengaged at work and many fail to hit their annual targets. Then it’s no surprise that the insurance industry experiences a high volume of employee turnover. Lack of motivation leads to poor performance leads to frustration and eventually turnover.
In order to alleviate these problems, consider what you can do to make work more fun and challenging. Create a focus on clearly defined goals, utilize leaderboards to show who is on top, celebrate achievements and milestones on TV screens throughout the office and run team and individual competitions.
Using gamification to introduce a sense of excitement and friendly competition is a simple, yet effective way to improve morale–and in turn, overall performance.
The need for updated technology
“50% of insurance sales leaders highlight the need for new and innovative products to grow their business… 40 % question their preparedness to meet the needs of the next generation.” - Ernst & Young survey, 2017.
Of the may tools that insurance leaders may choose to employ, there is almost always one common goal: to make the use of data as efficient, effective, and timely as possible. Data entry is often tedious and time-consuming, and this is only exacerbated when you are working with outdated resources. To compound the problem, many organizations struggle to provide enough awareness and transparency on key targets to keep sales agents consistently moving towards their goals in a highly engaged manner.
Implementing new technologies is essential–not only for practical purposes, but also for employee motivation. You can’t expect people to be engaged in their work tasks when they are not provided with the proper resources to complete them. In addition to up-to-date technology, gamification is a clever way to kick it up a notch and introduce a sense of fun and excitement into daily work tasks.
Motivating millennials
By 2025, millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce, thus it is more important than ever to recruit and retain them in your business. According to some studies, “only 4% of millennials were interested in pursuing a career in insurance.” So what can agencies do? We think gamification is key.
Millennials are intrinsically motivated. They also desire instant feedback and recognition, as well as a sense of meaning and purpose in their work. Gamification addresses these needs by providing real-time data, awareness and fun–as well as encouraging collaboration. It is an effective way to engage Gen Y’ers and ensure that your company is keeping up with industry trends.
Gamification is ultimately an effective motivational tool for millennial workers because it combines their professional needs and all of the things that they understand most–technology, data, recognition, competition and game elements. It gives them a fun, purpose-driven approach to mastering their skills, while simultaneously shining a light on metrics and activities that matter the most in your organization.
Join the gamification revolution
At SalesScreen, we do gamification differently. We know that while “fun at work” is important, the key goal is to drive increased performance on key business metrics, resulting in more activity, more deals closed and… well… more celebrating as a result.
We want to help organizations all around the globe aim higher, achieve more and close more deals. In order to do this, we’ve created a powerful SaaS tool that combines data visualization with gamification, allowing you to see all of your most important data in a clear, intuitive manner and also giving you the ability to use leaderboards, real-time sales contes, 1-1 battles, event celebrations on TV and much more to drive activity on those key metrics.
By placing more focus on your key targets in a fun and engaging way, while simultaneously making results visible in real-time you will find that company culture improves, performance improves and goal attainment skyrockets.
CONCLUSION
Gamification has proven to be a powerful tool in addressing some of the biggest challenges facing the insurance industry–from tedious and time-consuming data entry to unmotivated agents and employee turnover. By combining new technology and gaming elements, it is an excellent way to reengage employees. In particular, millennials, who will soon make up the majority of the global workforce.
See how Tryg is leveraging the power of gamification with SalesScreen.
“SalesScreen was a much needed replacement for our sales measuring tools and we’ve seen big increases with it. It’s a great tool, easy to use and motivates the whole office. It has brought our teamwork and engagement to a whole new level.” - Stian Rorby, Marketing Manager at Tryg
