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You won't miss the muzac: Member Service at giffgaff
So... we're a mobile company with no call centre.....d'uh?
Well here’s a thought: if call centres are so important for customer service why do so many of us hate calling them?
Yes, call centres can work well - like the one that fixed my Dyson at the weekend (long story), but they are no longer the only way to provide premium support. And they are often not even the method of choice for customers. Too often a call centre experience means hearing "please select from the following 9 options"; then long minutes of orchestral Coldplay followed by “Your call is important to us. All of our agents are busy. Please hold for the next available agent..”
And when you do get to speak to someone, often you won’t get the answers you need. Especially in a field like Mobile Services where technology advances so fast and spreads so widely that it’s impossible for even well trained call centre staff to know everything (like whether the SONY T610 needs an https or a plain http WAP gateway to enable GPRS for instance).
We believe there is a better way – one that’s cheaper for us to run (which means lower prices for you) and yet also gives a high level of service that will often be more informed, more useful, and more accessible than you could get from a call centre.
The key is to make use of the expertise and helpfulness out there already in the giffgaff member community, 24/7. No one person needs to know everything, instead we can tap the specific knowledge and passion of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of individuals. All we do is provide ways to bring it all together. And, unlike any other mobile service provider, we reward members for helping out - by awarding Payback Points that can be redeemed for cash twice a year.
Here’s how it works. Whenever you have a query or problem there are 3 ways to get an answer:
1) Find it in our forum. The forum is where members post questions and other members provide the answers... 24/7. You can find the forum by clicking on Community. It’s best to start by typing your question into the search box to see if your question has already been answered. Or you can go directly to the relevant board. Ask the Community is the main section and has hundreds of help and support topics, while Top Tips has great guides created by members.
2) Find it in our knowledge base. This is the section of the site called giffgaff answers . It’s a database of information organised in a question and answer format like the FAQ s you’ll see on other sites. We are constantly updating and adding to this base of information, including adding information provided by giffgaff members. You can browse giffgaff answers 24/7 by clicking the category listing; or you can search for a specific question by entering your search term on the Support homepage.
3) Contact a giffgaff agent. Once you've ordered a SIM you can send confidential queries e.g. billing or payment details, to one of our small team of advisors by logging into giffgaff.com, clicking Support and then clicking the Ask an Agent link. We have a turnaround time of 24 hours for queries sent this way, and you can keep track of everything you’ve asked and what we’ve replied in the messages section of Support. The giffgaff agents also browse the forum and help out sometimes by giving definitive answers to questions that are getting bogged down.
So much for the theory, but is it working? Yes. Like a charm. So far we have had hundreds of queries raised in the forum and only two have been escalated to our agent team because they didn’t get answered quickly enough. And the more questions that get answered the greater the likelihood you’ll find your answer in seconds rather than waiting on the phone. Plus, the average time to get an answer to a brand new question in the forum is about 7 hours, which is way ahead of the industry benchmark of 20 hours; and many questions are answered much faster.
Not only that, some of our members have already gone above and beyond by creating brilliant support material without any prompting by us. Check out this ‘guide to getting giffgaffed’ which was created by member bigfatbball2. Or this guide to unlocking created by ethani99. It's not surprising then that 20% of our registered users actively participated in the forum in the 6 weeks between launch and the end of 2009 (compared to an industry benchmark of 1%).
This is one reason why we prefer the term Member Service rather than Customer Service, because when you want an answer you don't have to listen to muzac, and you don't speak to a stanger in call centre - you are helped by another member with a giffgaff SIM just like you. That’s real people power.
Robbie Hearn
Chief of Member Experience
