Yesterday I stumbled across this talk, “Innovate with Gamification” from James Gardner:

Gardner recounted his experience as the head of the innovation program at a large UK bank.  He and his team needed a way to pull ideas from the “crowd,” the thousands of tellers, branch managers, and corporate office analysts that the bank employed, so they developed a platform that mimicked the stock market by allowing employees to submit ideas and then trade on them for virtual currency. The “innovation market” was a hit.

What idea did this internal innovation stock market value the most?  At that time, many of the bank’s branches featured self-service teller machines, where consumers applied for loans by completing a digital workflow. Employees in the branches had noticed (where upper management had not) that some applicants got up and left after clicking through most of the process but before hitting submit.  The idea? Move a single checkbox from the left to the right.

According to Gardner, the idea traded “like you wouldn’t believe” in the innovation market, until management was “forced to listen.” They made the change, and the resulting increase in loans applications saved the bank millions of pounds a month.

Gardner went on to talk about how he applied a similar gamificiation process in the public sector with similar results, and about principles of gamificiation generally, but I was stuck on the checkbox.  A few weeks ago Andera hosted a webinar called “Understanding Abandonment: Workflow Design to Increase Conversion” (see the blog post about it here) presented by Andera’s Director of User Experience, Devjit Basu.  The checkbox change would have fallen into Basu’s category of “Unexpected Layout,” just one of nine principles he covered during the webinar.  I was struck by how such a small part of workflow design, which is such a small part of overall customer acquisition strategy, could have such a huge impact on the business.

Technology has made it easy for us to manufacture a single impression for million people, through standardized software sent to every bank branch, or though the great distributor, the internet.  It’s also multiplied the amount of impressions that we as consumers must sort through, and reduced our tolerance for frustration.  When paper ruled the process, encounters between bankers and customers were highly customizable and easy to troubleshoot.  A checkbox does not create a problem if an employee is helping you through the process.  Of course, those encounters were also time consuming and therefore expensive; it’s clear that, like all industries, banking is moving towards technology and scalability, not away from it.

The greater the scale, the more the important the impression.  As a marketer, I know that the little things matter. We’re the department that spends hours agonizing over a 40 character subject line because one wrong word can make our email open rates plummet, and that tweaks our website SEO every few weeks to see if we can raise our site traffic by one or two percent. But it’s not always easy to know what the right little thing is.

That’s where the “crowd” comes in. Gardner’s talk reminded me of a Ted Talk by Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of reddit, a “social news website” where the top stories are determined entirely by users who vote items up or down. As part of a campaign to stop a whaling in Japan, Greenpeace put together a poll to choose the name of a representative humpback they were tracking. Their options included “Anahi” “Kaiman” and,“Mister Splashy Pants.” Greenpeace didn’t really want their whale to be named “Mister Splashy Pants” but the internet, led by users on reddit, took over and the poll closed in a landslide.  Fueled partly by the meme of “Mister Splash Pants,” Greenpeace accomplished their mission, and also started an entire Mr. Splashy Pants merchandise campaign.  The message?Listen to the crowd.

Gardner was able to pinpoint the best idea for the bank by drawing on the wisdom of thousands, not on the wisdom of one.  The physicist Richard Fenyman once said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”   Two or three heads are better than one, but many studies have shown that “groupthink” can still be dangerously off-target.  Crowds aren’t infallible, we all know that stock markets sometimes produce bubbles, but the evidence suggests that “the wisdom of crowds” is greater than that of any smaller segment.   And when it’s a crowd of customers, the crowd is always right.

The first step is to remember that the little things matter. The second step is to listen to the crowd; look at abandonment statistics, look at your website traffic, ask your employees, ask your customers, ask consumers who aren’t your customers.   When you make the same impression a million times, it’s worth it.