Hi everyone,

I am submitting giffgaff for an entry in the Forrester Groundswell Awards this year because I think we really deserve to win. The Groundswell awards focus on those companies which represent excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal.

I feel we have proven that we integrate our members into the way our business works, including using your help to design our products and improve how our processes work. There are many more examples of how great we've all worked together. But I think it is best if you read the article I have submitted as our entry. I hope you all like it!

You can vote for us here: http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2010/detail.php?id=383

Cheers,

Vincent

Forrester Groundswell Award Entry – giffgaff: The mobile network run by you

‘giffgaff’ is an old Scottish term that refers to the process of mutual giving – a name totally in keeping for a company whose passionate and knowledgeable users are not only the front line of customer support  but also a driving force in the running of the company itself.  In fact, this UK-based mobile phone operator – whose tag line is ‘The mobile network run by you’ – has no huge call centres with agents. It doesn’t even have small call centers – well just one tiny one for user billing inquiries. Instead, the expert ‘giffgaffers’ rely on and contribute to, a growing user-generated pool of knowledge in their Lithium-powered community to get help fast and shape the company’s service offerings.

Active community members get rewarded for running parts of the business including answering questions in the community, attracting new members or helping to promote the company.

As a thank you, community members are rewarded with kudos, elevated reputation and Payback Points which are awarded every month. These points which are accumulated for referring people to the service or helping people by answering questions in the community can be applied against their monthly mobile services, taken as a cash reward or donated to a charitable cause every six Months.

giffgaff’s community is one of the driving forces behind the success of the mobile provider - the network really is powered by its members. Many people pay lip service to being run by members – but what really sets giffgaff apart is the fact that it really has no call centre and all customer service (except for billing queries) is done by the online community. 

In fact, giffgaff launched its community even before the mobile service went live.

Members who joined before the company rolled out its beta service in late 2009 are given the special rank of Founders. These people helped shape a lot of what the service is today, including much of the bundles, specials and programs. Truly a community driven company.

Crowd-sourced material keeps giffgaffs costs lower and lets them pass the savings back to the members – a situation where everyone wins. And just how are these members contributing…  Well how are these for stats?

• As of July 2010 members have asked over 3000 questions in the ‘help’ forums
• the community has responded with over 21,000 answers
• 100% of the questions were answered by the community
• average response time of under 5 minutes
• an amazing 95% of queries were answered within the hour

And check out the giffgaffers dedication – the top ten users spent over 7 hours a day on average online during July this year.

But the community isn’t just the ‘giffgaff support team’.

The passionate userbase is also the marketing and R&D engine too.  giffgaff members have been spreading the word, as well as making commercials.  So far giffgaff members have produced and posted 146 videos online, generating over 500,000 views to date.

And for ideas, the community implemented an Ideas Exchange in February to help collect crowd-sourced ideas to help improve the service further. With over 400 ideas submitted in the last few months, the community has seen over 50 ideas implemented to help improve the mobile service with over 40 more in development.

A great example of how giffgaff is run by its community is the launch of ‘goodybags’, price bundles which are truly unlimited. giffgaff asked its community what they wanted, and received 285 responses, which helped to guide the development of the great value bundle for people.

giffgaff is a business with a difference. It’s run by the community for the community – the epitome of Groundswell at work.

Given the choice to hold on the end of the line listening to Celine Dion (or occasionally Greensleeves) or finding your answer online  – which would you chose?

British Gas’s latest campaign commits them to answer your customer service call within 60 seconds or they’ll offer to call you back. This type of service has been around for ages, and it’s a convenient way for a call centre to manage inbound call volumes – trouble is it’s not that convenient for you – as you have no idea when they’ll be calling you back.

giffgaff support is different, similar to the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin song – members are doing it for themselves, and there a number of ways that can happen.

Under Support, members are searching previous answers and FAQ’s for instant answers – if they can’t find the answer there they are posing their question to the community.

Incredibly most new joiners’ questions are answered in the community within 5 minutes…and 95% are answered within an hour.

Plus another advantage of being online, is that we’re not limited to the traditional opening hours - night owls are asking questions and getting answers in the small wee hours as well.

When giffgaff launched, there was some scepticism about the quality of the answers that you’d get back. Proof is in the pudding as they say, the level of commitment and knowledge of members within the forum is amazing – if you want to test it out for yourself, add a question to ‘Join: Considering giffgaff’ and see what you get back.

As the majority of questions are being answered by the community, it’s only the private account related questions that need to be answered by our small team of Member Service Agents. This of course helps keep giffgaff’s operating costs low, and these savings are passed back to the members.  

Educating new members coming on board to this new style of customer service and creating efficiencies within the volume of information that is now available is a challenge. We’re constantly learning and looking for ways to improve things.  

As you’d expect, I’m a fan of online support – just need to wait until my water, electricity, gas, tv subscription suppliers to catch on.

Hi all,

One of the things we always wanted to do when we launched giffgaff was to give our community the ability to build their own applications and use some of the giffgaff information in their apps. Although some of you have already built giffgaff applications for the iPhone and the Nokia, we’re still looking at this and are hard at work with a couple of plans to provide some APIs in the near future.

This will hopefully make what is out there already even better and give scope to a whole new range of apps. We have a fair idea of what kind of information you want from reading previous posts and the ideas board, and of course some things are easier to provide to you than others.

To start with, there are a few basic things we’d like to open up, such as the ability to check whether the services are available or not and a logging in process for security to check the members account etc.

After that we were thinking of having APIs to provide Customers details, account balance and goodybag details (amount, expiry, queued). At the moment these are screen scraped, but we’d really like it if this information came from our servers, so changes to the site wouldn’t affect any of the apps that are live.

These would be read only APIs to start with and depending on feedback we would open them up to offer changes and purchases as well.

We know there are loads of requests to get access to call history and we are investigating the performance of offering this as there are impacts on the database and we’d also look to give you the ability to turn some things on and off – balance messages after calls, bars, network access etc. etc.

So although we are not yet ready to release anything, we are working very hard on the processes, integration, development environment and interface documents etc. so at this moment we are keen to engage developers to see what we can build together.

So if you have any specific requirements or ideas on what we should open up, what we can look at or how we can help you, please let us know. You can do this by commenting on this blog, creating a thread for discussion on our forums or by sending me a private message.

I look forward to all of your input and it will create some discussion as well as fantastic apps once we start providing the API’s.

Cheers,

Vincent

Hi all,

I’m pleased to announce that we now have our very first giffgaff application in the Ovi Store. I seriously love the fact that our community continues to create fantastic apps and this one is no exception.

Created by jack17938, it is an app which gives you a quick and easy way of keeping up to date with giffgaff.

Specifically created with non-smart phones in mind, it is a fast loading RSS application that displays a condensed version of the giffgaff blog, the giffgaff welcome and news board and the giffgaff notice board.

This app will give you all the latest news, blog updates and possible outages direct from the giffgaff website.

The biggest benefit is that it doesn't require 3G signals to load quickly - and is only 0.01 Mb in size to download. It will work with most Nokia phones as there are 2 versions that should cover the whole range of phones. The 2 different versions aren't visible on the website however because Nokia is clever enough to decide which one you need when you enter your model number.

Well done jack17938 and thank you very much for sharing this with us.

Cheers,

Vincent

Hi all,

We just wanted to let you know that our half price goodybag promotion is going to continue for another Month.

The demand for our half price goodybags has just been phenomenal over the last couple of weeks. Many people have written about us in blogs, we had great mentions on Money Saving Expert and HotUKDeals  and there has been a great lot of buzz in different forums across the net as well as in social media like Twitter and Facebook.

Aside from online chatter in blogs and articles, the half price goodybags really gave our members a great chance to talk about giffgaff as well and we’re sure helped spread the word about giffgaff this summer.

We’ve had many new members signing up in the last weeks and as you know, giffgaff is all about mutuality, so we want to give everyone a chance to spread the word about giffgaff to your mates.

When you spread the word to your mates of family you want to of course tell them about the fantastic deal you got from giffgaff and by extending this promotion, it gives them even more reason to sign up now.  So there we are, you can now spread the word and tell everyone our half price goodybag promotion is running for another Month.

Great news I’m sure you’ll all agree.

Let’s get more people giffgaffed

Cheers,

Vincent

Hi all,

Today I'm proud to announce the first two iPhone applications created by our community are now completed.

 confidence has created an iPhone application called Mygiffgaff which is a beautiful execution of a very useful program that allows you to check your giffgaff balance as well as see which goodybags you have active and which one you have queued up.

The application also allows you to send 'Spread the word' emails to your friends, with a slick interface which connects to us and even tells you how many points you've earned for sending that email!

And on top of that it has nicely integrated our new mobile forum into the application so you don't even have to leave the app to post and read all of the fantastic content on our forums and blogs.

So simply go to the Apple store and search for 'Mygiffgaff' or 'giffgaff' and you find this app available for download. If you have any questions regarding the application you can of course simple send  confidence a private message or discuss the application here on the forums.

The second application that has been created by our community is a game whereby you have to bounce a giffgaff SIM as high as possible to get the best score.

 danielclo1il has created this fantastic game of which you can see a demonstration below.

This application can be found on the Apple store again by simply searching for giffgaff and should be available for download somewhere in the middle of next week.

So good luck with getting the best scores and if you have any questions I'm sure  danielclo1il will be more than happy to answer any and all questions you might have via private message or on the forums here.

So give it up for danielclo1il and confidence who have created these amazing applications and I for one can wait to see what other applications will be created in the future.

Android apps anyone?

Cheers,

Vincent

With an election not too far in the past negative vs positive campaigning is a debate many of us have had recently. The same principle applies to marketing – you can choose to be relentlessly positive about yourself or you can choose to pick the competition apart.

Here at giffgaff we normally tread somewhere inbetween – not directly naming and shaming individual competitors but trying to point out some of the injustices of the mobile market in general.

However, this week at our trading meeting our web shop manager, Kim, went through a pricing update and the longer it went on the angrier I got – so forget the policy, prepare for some shaming……

Our friends at Virgin Mobile announced a nice thing – instead of having to top up £20 to get some free stuff their customers now have to only top up by £15. Not quite so loudly announced was the fact that their standard call rate to mobiles and landlines went up from 20p to 25p a minute. HEY, THAT’S 25% PRICE INCREASE! For Virgin customers it’s a bit like being asked to look behind you in the playground as the local bully nicks your sweets and slaps you on the face if you ask me.

Meanwhile, if memory serves me correctly Vodafone made a bit of a deal about coming clean and replacing their unlimited texts pay monthly bundle with one of 3000 texts. Just a couple of months later they have now re-introduced their unlimited offer but with, wait for it, a fair usage policy of 3000 texts per month.

I had a very nice chat with one of Voda's online (half human, half computer) sales reps - and it appears that they don't even bother to mention there's a fair usage policy on the web site and there are no Ts&Cs mentioning them either!!! I've been a little evil and attached a screen grab of the conversation at the end of this post - sorry Arnold!

I could go on, but it’s just a sad fact that the mobile industry doesn’t seem to realise that many of their customers see right through these kind of pricing weasels – its why your average network is trusted about as much as your average double glazing salesman.

I hope you agree with me that giffgaff is different – we like to keep things simple.

If you just want to pay as you use then we have a simple rate for voice and text – rates that are at least 60% cheaper than the standard rates of the big networks.

 If you want to buy in bulk we give you a discount with our monthly goodybags – all of which come with unlimited texts, mobile data or voice minutes.

On top of that we’ve halved the price of 3 of our goodybags in July – so, if like me, you get hot under the collar about prices, there’s never been a better time to join, or get your friends to join giffgaff.

Here's that Voda web chat by the way.....

Hi all,

This will be a blog with lots of different little updates, so something for everyone I hope.

As most of you are aware our voicemail number is going to change from 111 to 443. At the moment you can use both 111 and 443 (this has been possible for a while now) but soon we will actually turn 111 off.

So please be aware that from the 12th of July 111 will no longer be accessible as a voicemail number.

The government in its infinite wisdom has decided that they will use 111 as a number for non-emergency healthcare services. The voicemail number 443, which coincidently spells 'gif' has been chosen by the community as our new number in a discussion we opened a while ago. So there you go, a shiny new number chosen by you.

Should you want to program the new voicemail number as a hotkey, then please note that the first 4 numbers on your sim are already pre-programmed, so you will have to program your handset to speed dial 443 from number 5 onwards. Each handset does this differently, so you will have to check your manual on how to do that.

All new sims we send out will of course have 443 pre-programmed on the number 1 hotkey.

The second announcement is the fact that you can now access a mobile version of our forums.

This was a much requested feature which is now live. So please enjoy giffgaff on your mobile. The link is the same as always, it's just that the default page it opens is now optimised for mobile browsing, although the full version is still available should you prefer that.

As we're talking about much requested features, I'm pleased to announce you can now also activate your sim by buying an unlimited internet goodybag. So you no longer need to activate your sim by buying a top up and then using that credit to buy a goodybag (still possible of course), but you can simply activate by buying an unlimited internet goodybag straight away.

You are also now able to remove your stored credit card details. This was previously not possible but this has now been updated.

The new data pricing for roaming in the EU has also gone live which means making calls remains at 35p, receiving calls goes from 18p to 15p, and sending texts goes from 11p to 10p.

So there we go, lots of little updates which I hope will please everyone.

As always, any feedback is greatly appreciated and have fun with giffgaff.

Cheers,

Vincent

Hi all,

Since the launch of our advertising campaign it’s just been going fantastically well with giffgaff. As we said, in the first six Months of giffgaff we were in beta and not worried about acquiring new members at all and still got a good 3000 of you on board. Thanks for having so much trust in us

Now we’re out of beta we started looking at expanding our member base a bit more and to do that we launched our advertising campaign, we like to call ‘The man’. This has been received ever so well, and we’ve had great coverage in all the national newspapers, as well as a whole heap of websites.

This has all let to us doubling our member base in one Month to 6000! Absolutely amazing right? So to keep this momentum going we would love it if you got all your mates on giffgaff as well which we’ve made a little bit easier this July.

As you know we have our incentives already in place, by giving you 500 points as well as giving the person that signs up £5 airtime credit. But to make it even easier for this Month and to give everyone a little taster of how great giffgaff is, you can tell your mates our unlimited data goodybags are 50% off for the Month of July.

That means this month they can get:

•         Unlimited calls, unlimited texts and unlimited mobile Internet for only £17.50 (was £35)

•         300 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited mobile Internet for only £7.50 (was £15)

•         100 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited mobile Internet for only £5 (was £10)

To order some extra SIMs for your friends, log into my giffgaff and head to 'spread the word', we'll send them straight out to you. If you're quick enough they might arrive in your post box tomorrow.

Of course you can pick one of the half price goodybags up yourself as well, it wouldn’t really be very giffgaff otherwise.

And don’t worry if you’ve already bought an unlimited data goodybag that will start running in July, as those of you who did, will get half the money you spend refunded to you account. If that isn’t giffgaff, I don’t know what is

Cheers,

Vincent