Blog

[#1]

We’re proud to announce a European first, we’ve launched our integrated support of our community with Facebook.

We’re the very first company in Europe to integrate our support forums through Lithium with Facebook.

As a company you should always strive to engage your community where they are, rather than making them come to you. Of course that is not always possible for everything a company does, but when people are in trouble or have questions about you, you would do well to engage them where these questions are raised.

First and foremost to make sure you create an environment where customers can ask questions and raise issues with minimal effort and secondly to resolve issues quickly.

We understand that not everyone feels comfortable in a forum environment and as Facebook is one of the most used websites on the internet we feel it makes sense that we try to find and help our members there.

We are always looking for ways to improve community engagement and add additional places for support for our members. And somehow integrate this into our community therefore everyone would benefit from the existing strength and knowledge of our established community.

The solution we have come up with caters for both in an elegant and simple way and means members can now choose which environment they’re most comfortable with.

Today we’ve launched integrated help on Facebook – adding an extra tab to our Facebook profile called ‘Help’. When anyone on Facebook posts a question there it will appear on Facebook as a ‘Wall’ post, while at the same time appearing on our forum as a new thread in our ‘Help: Ask the community’ section. People can either reply via Facebook or if you are already on the giffgaf forums, simply reply there and it will appear on the Facebook wall.

We think this is a brilliant step in the right direction and hope you will all enjoy giffgaff wherever you may find us

Check out the next customer service improvement instalment tomorrow from Heather.

Cheers,

Vincent

[#2]

Vincent, in terms of payback how does it work? Will people still get payback for posting through Facebook?

[#3]

This is excellent and will certainly help.

@reddwarf. It says above that you can continue to post on the forum and it will appear on facebook as well.

[#4]

Hi reddwarf, payback works the same.

You are essentially posting on the giffgaff forums, but with a facebook skin.

Clever right?

[#5]

I love that idea!

With service like this, why are people still on the big networks?!

Great work again guys and thanks for clearing that up Vincent, I had a similar query.

[#6]

Can i make a suggestion that all facebook posts are shown as such in the Forum? Might make people understand why the people asking the questions seem to have little to no idea about giffgaff etc...

[#7]

I believe there is a Posted from Facebook line automatically displayed after any posts are made through facebook

[#8]

While there may be a posted from Facebook line, it is not that obvious i think...

I know that vincent et al want this to be as seemless as possible integration wise, but I am thinking a whole new board could be an idea. We do not want to be responding to comments to questions raised on facebook with things along the lines of "use the search in future" when they will not have access to this. Sureley if we want as good an impression as possible to be made to potential users, then we will need to ensure that advice given is as good and polite as possible...

[#9]

Looks like a great idea. I personally dislike and don't use facebook but most people do and this is a good way of helping to support the customers who do.

[#10]

Great work but i do agree with jamjaw

[#11]

@jamjaw Although I do not agree with people commenting on questions with 'use search in the future' as I feel not everyone has the experience you have with using forums or in general would rather like an answer to their specific question rather than search through answers that other people got, the search function is available on the Facebook integration as well

So as a general rule, simply stay polite and give great advice as you already said and be patient with people. Once you have answered their question, you could always politely nudge them in the direction of the search functionality should they have another question