The Use of Gamification in Gastronomic Questionnaires

Abstract

Obtaining customer opinions and customer wishes is increasingly becoming an important part of any entrepreneurial activity for determining customer satisfaction and, subsequently, optimizing products and services as well as strengthen customer loyalty. In catering, there are several ways to capture the guest’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction, as well as customer preferences and customer needs across different channels. One way to obtain a customer’s opinion is to provide a digital online questionnaire. Unfortunately, the participa-tion of guests in such surveys is usually low. In addition, many online question-naires are aborted prematurely, and questions which require an individual text answer are often left unanswered. Gamification is a process to use game ele-ments, game techniques and game mechanics from games in a different context in order to motivate and force people to do certain activities. This paper dis-cusses whether the use of game elements in an existing gastronomical online questionnaire enhances the engagement of users and whether customer satisfac-tion remains the same. Based on an existing gastronomical online questionnaire from the company ITELL.SOLUTIONS GmbH a gamified questionnaire vari-ant has been developed. Game elements such as points, badges, avatar, story, progress bar and instant feedback have been included. The investigation showed that the use of gamification in questionnaires on open questions did not worsen the involvement of users. The customer satisfac-tion remained unchanged by the embedding of game elements too. Users of the expanded game questionnaire tended to give more precise and longer answers. The completion time also slightly increased for the gamified questionnaire. A direct comparison between the two variants of the questionnaire, showed that users preferred the design of the gamified questionnaire.