Are Your Customers Actually Getting Anywhere… or Just Walking in Circles?

Customers stay engaged when they can see progress. Open world games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey excel at this through visible milestones, layered goals, and consistent reinforcement. Brands can apply the same mechanics by adopting clear progress indicators, cross-channel consistency, and reward structures that evolve over time. When customers feel their actions matter, retention, loyalty, and lifetime value all improve.

Most brands assume their customers feel like they’re making progress. They cross off steps, complete tasks, reach “milestones,” and allegedly move through a journey. But here’s the uncomfortable question: would your customers agree with that assessment, or do they feel like they’re endlessly wandering around your experience with the illusion of forward motion?

Open world video games figured this out years ago. Enterprise CX, for the most part, hasn’t. Yet the parallels are surprisingly direct.

Why Progress Is a CX Problem Worth Solving

Customers disengage when they can’t see whether their actions—buying, upgrading, learning, subscribing—add up to something meaningful. If the experience feels static, motivation fades. Loyalty programs plateau. Onboarding journeys stall. Subscription usage drops.

This isn’t a customer problem. It’s a design problem.

Humans want signals that they’re moving forward. They want to understand their status, their proximity to the next milestone, and what’s waiting on the other side. Without these cues, even well-built CX ecosystems feel flat.

How Open World Games Master the Art of Visible Progress

To understand why progress works, it helps to look at how open world games keep players motivated across dozens of hours. Consider Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, where players roam ancient Greece leveling up, unlocking abilities, earning gear, and gaining access to new regions.

The magic is in the structure:

• Progress bars and level indicators show exactly how close the player is to the next upgrade.

• Skill trees make advancement concrete; new abilities materially change what players can do.

• Quest logs provide a constant queue of actionable goals.

• Achievement notifications reinforce success at the right moments.

• Short- and long-term goals keep the pacing balanced so engagement never bottoms out.

This isn’t accidental. It’s engineered motivation.

Developers tune these systems through continuous data analysis, balancing player effort and reward. When they get it right, players feel a sense of upward momentum—even when the world around them is massive and non-linear.

Translating Game Mechanics into Omnichannel CX

Where games have progress bars, brands have loyalty tiers. Where games have quest logs, brands have onboarding flows. Where games have skill trees, brands have customer capability development (training, configuration, usage milestones).

When companies adopt progress mechanics, three outcomes follow:

1. Customers stay engaged longer

Visible progress reduces friction by giving customers a reason to continue. Whether it’s a personalized savings goal or a subscription streak, momentum matters.

2. Rewards feel earned and meaningful

A milestone is more powerful when the customer sees how they achieved it. “You’re two steps away from unlocking new benefits” drives behavior more effectively than the generic “You’ve earned a reward.”

3. The experience becomes cumulative, not fragmented

Progress connects touchpoints. It gives the experience a spine.

A well-known real-world example is Starbucks Rewards, which uses stars, tiers, and clear visual tracking to keep customers focused on what’s next. The system is simple, consistent, and present across every channel—mobile app, point of sale, email, and web. This clarity is a major reason the program drives both frequency and spend.

Common Reasons Brands Get This Wrong

Progress is easy to misunderstand. Teams often overengineer it or, worse, treat it as an afterthought. The most common pitfalls include:

• Milestones that are unclear or arbitrary

• Rewards that don’t arrive consistently

• Progress bars that appear only in one channel

• Data fragmentation that causes mismatched signals

• Programs that launch but never evolve

In games, these issues would tank engagement. In CX, they quietly chip away at loyalty.

What Leaders Should Do Next

If progress is going to work, it needs structure. Start with these priorities:

• Define 3–5 meaningful milestones that represent real customer advancement.

• Create a unified progress language—consistent visuals, consistent terminology, consistent triggers.

• Ensure all channels reference the same data so customers see the same status everywhere.

• Introduce micro-achievements to reduce early-stage drop-off.

• Treat the progress system as a product, not a campaign; review and tune it regularly.

Progress is not decoration. It’s infrastructure.

Closing Thought

Customers aren’t asking for fireworks or confetti cannons. They simply want to know their actions matter and that their relationship with your brand isn’t stuck at level one forever. Open world games understand this instinctively. It’s time for CX leaders to catch up.

If you want customers to stay, give them a clear path forward—and make sure they can see themselves moving along it.