It’s a new year and there’s lots new things happening at giffgaff already – especially for our community of members.
We launched our “send a SIM ” feature just before Christmas and this was a big step for us as a business. Being people powered is about giving our members opportunities to help grow and run giffgaff – so now if you like what we do you can send your friends one of our SIMs.
The great thing is that in addition to being able to call for free between you and your friend, your friend gets a £5 airtime gift from giffgaff and you get 500 Payback points worth £5 too.
There’s been a bit of debate on our forum about why ALL new members can’t get the £5 – there are two reasons for this. First off – if we gave it to everyone then there would be some folks who would be tempted to order a new SIM every time the £5 ran out – clearly not smart business for giffgaff! Secondly – we really wanted to make these friend SIMs easy for our members to recommend – and we think it’s great if our members can offer potential new customers a better deal than giffgaff can!
Over Christmas we’ve been working hard on preparing our first Payback update where we’ll be telling all our members how many Payback points they earned in December. We’ve been really encouraged by the involvement we’ve had from our members – over 20% have been actively involved in the community areas of our website. The industry benchmark for involvement is only 1% so we’re really pleased that our community approach has been proven to be really resonating with our members.
In fact everywhere I look I’m seeing examples of where the community is really making a difference – here’s an example. Recent legislation has brought down the cost of roaming calls in the EU – but what we had missed is that the European Free Trade Association countries had mirrored the initiative – and this had led us to price roaming calls higher in these countries than we needed to. So thanks to the feedback from andy0 we’re now making plans to reduce roaming prices in Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein to be in line with the lower EU rates.
We’re continuing to build up our resources for the community too – in January we’ll be releasing ideas management and voting features – so community generated ideas can be managed properly and the community itself can vote on what the best ideas are. We’ve also grown the giffgaff team to include a dedicated community manager – Vincent Boon has joined the team from Sony (where he managed the European gaming forums). He’ll be making sure the forum continues to be an interesting place to be and that we continue to listen closely to what’s being said there.
Mike
on:
A £20 goodybag, giffgaff labs and much more reveal...
vincent
on:
Forrester Groundswel