Harness Peloton and Apple Watch power for your organization
Healthy competition drives creativity and innovation.
Fitness enthusiasts have become obsessed with motivational apps and technology like the Peloton and Apple Watch. The consumerization of such technologies in our personal lives provides opportunities for innovative insurance organizations to harness that same energy, motivation, and momentum to produce significant results while also meeting the growing employee need for real-time recognition.
While the concept of gamification isn’t new, the current application of this technology in the fitness realm has proven that rewarding, motivational triggers such as records, personal bests, streaks, and climbing a leaderboard are as powerful as ever.
The Peloton and Apple Watch phenomenon are here to stay. Consumers, who also happen to be employees of many organizations, have embraced these products, the technology and psychology of them wholeheartedly.
A look at Peloton
This company has completely disrupted the fitness market. With the onset of COVID-19 and the restrictions put in place for attending the gym or a favorite fitness studio, workout fans were left with few options. The market was right, and Peloton is riding the tailwinds of success by offering at-home solutions that people love.
Here’s another reason Peloton is experiencing so much success: The company unlocked the power of motivating users with sophisticated gamification that goes beyond simple engagement to create an avid fan culture. Ask any Peloton user if they like their bike or treadmill, and you will get an almost cult-like response. “Yes! I love it! I’m working out more than ever, and it’s actually fun! I’m obsessed!”
Lessons from Apple Watch
Beyond telling time, the Apple Watch is a motivational tool that reminds people to move, exercise or stand. “Closing my rings” has become a goal, not to mention a complete change of mindset, for more than 81 million people who own the Apple Watch.
The simplicity of tracking activity and movement, seeing progress, and making small changes daily is all wrapped up on the clean interface that Apple has mastered so well.
While one person may be motivated to run a marathon and chalk up miles in their training program, another may simply want to establish the habit of going for a 20-minute walk every day. Both may be equally challenging to the specific individual, and the Apple Watch rewards and recognizes the effort. It taps into the universal human psychology of feeling good by setting and completing a goal, receiving recognition for it, and advancing to the next level.
Common threads
Technologically savvy insurance brokerages and agencies already track metrics and data that can feed similar motivational platforms. After all, without gathering fitness data and presenting it in real-time, Peloton and Apple Watch would simply be hardware.
Data is the key that holds the magic. Tracking and storing data is already in place for most organizations. In fact, most organizations are so overloaded with data that the challenge lies in presenting it to users in a way that encourages and motivates positive behaviors. The clean, understandable presentation of this information unleashes the power of the numbers, bridging the gap between loads of unread Excel spreadsheets or hundreds of reports to taking action and improving performance.
Real-time visibility
Once the data is captured, that relevant, timely information must be shared with teams. Do team members know the steps they need to take to meet their goals and improve their job performance today?
What if one outbound sales call would have made a producer an extra $100 last month based on their compensation plan? What if 1,000 extra outbound calls by one producer over the course of the year would have made the agent an extra $100,000 in premium? Scaling that momentum across the entire agency can increase sales, customer retention, and overall financial performance.
Too often, team individuals hear about what happened yesterday — instead of knowing what they can make happen today. If an Apple Watch gave all the data from the day before, what’s the point? Real-time visibility to real time performance encourages positive behaviors — today.
Personal accomplishment
Intrinsic motivators are those deep-seated, intangibles that drive people to excel. Accountability, Mastery, Contribution, Progress, Meaningfulness and Autonomy are all the “extras” that keep people motivated. The sense of progress and accomplishment is the victory. What motivates one person may not apply to the whole organization.
Utilizing intrinsic motivators enables an agency to appeal to the personal sense of accomplishment that we crave. Entry-level personnel will not likely meet the same standard as seasoned professionals, but small improvements daily and constantly striving to beat one’s personal best will ultimately lead to the success of the individual and the agency.
Reminders
Closely related to real-time visibility are reminders to take action, now, on what needs to be done to meet a goal. How many of us have seen a group of people at the office all stand up at ten minutes before the hour? It’s likely they were reminded by their fitness watch that they have been sitting too long. Would they have all stood up and moved had they not been reminded?
Just like the pings from an Apple Watch, many of us need a reminder to do one more activity to meet our goals. Reminders keep team members focused and encourage behavior in sales or service KPIs such as cross-selling, asking for referrals, reducing claim cycle time, or increasing underwriting speed.
Recognition and rewards
Recognizing producers for achieving their goals, large or small, spurs them to work harder and be more productive. Part of what makes a job meaningful is the reward of doing a great job. Rewards are effective because of how they make people feel. Again, a sense of accomplishment is achieved by something as simple as watching “digital confetti” get thrown or receiving a new badge.
The happy accident of rewarding employees for meeting a goal is recognition. Appreciation for a job well done is an essential human need that should never be discounted. Rewards, recognition, and praise are fundamental elements to keeping people happy, focused and motivated to succeed.
Training new producers or service team members is a significant cost to agencies of any size, both financially and in terms of overall productivity. Employee retention and churn can be improved by simply recognizing employees for work well done.
Competition
Healthy competition is a positive incentive in the workplace. Competition drives creativity, innovation and improves the quality of work getting done. When setting up competitions in any organization, it’s important to structure them in a positive and productive way.
Peloton and Apple Watch tap the power of competitions while leveraging the motivational triggers that encourage people to achieve their goals. Positive social pressure pushes users to do just a little more. We’ve all had days that we just don’t want to work out. But if users are competing with a friend, and that friend has logged their points for the day, that might be just the nudge needed to get moving.
Competitions should be framed around a specific, attainable goals. Team members must clearly understand the steps needed to score points in the competition.
A competition put in place without the support of rewards, reminders and real-time visibility to progress can be deflating. Often, an employee may know they are not going to win the overall game. But competing against oneself can be the most powerful motivator of all. If an individual can beat their own personal best, they are victorious.
Competitions also give the organization the opportunity to coach team members. With clearly defined expectations and real-time visibility to performance, management can quickly identify weak points and provide helpful feedback and training to team members.
What follows are three insurance use cases that illustrate the power of employee gamification in the insurance space.
Distribution
Whether a carrier distributes their products as a direct writer, through independent agents or via its captive agency force, increasing the frequency and quality of client appointments and conversations will nearly always have a positive impact on policy counts and premium.
By nature, most sales professionals are competitive. Setting up friendly competitions that focus sales teams on the goals currently important to the organization will increase the sales activities as well as align the entire organization, from the producer up to Carrier level, invaluable in a direct writer and captive carrier ecosystem.
Motivational elements can also be used to better understand customers, their needs, and risks. For instance, if an agent understands that their best clients have a complete risk profile, then gamification can be leveraged to motivate teams to increase the percentage of the information gathered from each client. A simple competition based on the percentage of data gathered for each client’s risk profile will pave a path to better client visibility, wallet share and retention.
For carriers that distribute their products with independent agencies, gaining traction with independent agents becomes a key challenge and opportunity. How can carriers gain mind share with independent agents that are quoting new business or renewals? By leveraging motivational elements such as gaming theory and sports psychology, carriers can increase awareness and motivate independent agents to take action on a targeted basis.
Claims
Increasing employee engagement, expertise, and productivity by improving Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that affect client satisfaction while balancing expense ratios is the goal for many claims centers.
Providing employees with visibility to near-real-time data collected from telephony or CRM systems on a clean dashboard motivates by highlighting, recognizing, and celebrating personal bests, competition standings, progress towards goals and center records. Metrics on employee engagement such as new claims completed, average time to settle, calls handled within 24 hours, total calls handled, mail tasks completed lead to a more operational efficient claims center while improving customer satisfaction. Learning paths are clearly highlighted to build acumen. Additionally, creating virtual team competitions by segmenting a center based upon tenure or expertise will increase knowledge transfer while lifting performance.
Technology and change management
Change management is all about transitioning to a future, desired state. Just like hitting fitness goals, small behavioral changes matter. Getting credit or points for completing a risk profile, gathering information to provide a household quote vs. single line auto or logging into a new system software or going through a training program is a motivating factor to break from old habits and adopt new ones.
Gamification communicates goals, gives feedback to progress and rewards and recognizes employee achievement. If a Carrier is launching a new technology or process, moving an entire organization through the phases of familiarity to increased activity to engagement to mastery requires coordinated series of strategic steps.
Quick wins can be easily achieved, and longer-term engagement is made possible using a series of competitions and visibility of progress toward the goal.
Jeff Brown is the CEO of Mivation, a provider of software that empowers the management of performance, productivity, motivation and gamification using actionable data and intelligence. Mivation’s SaaS platforms deliver real-time visibility into performance along with custom competitions, personal bests, challenges, records — motivating teams to hit business goals and to exceed them.
These opinions are the author’s own.
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