Welcome and News

[vincent]

Hi all,

Just to let you know, we have now implemented incident notifications.

What does this mean?

Well, for those people who don't know, we have a feature in the website which allows you to 'Ask an Agent' a support question. Should you have issues with billing and whatnot. We then reply to that and you get an answer in your mailbox under the 'My giffgaff' page.

We received quite a bit of feedback from you that people didn't know that the 'My giffgaff' page is where the response went, and also that you refreshed the page over and over because you didn't get a notification when you did get a response.

We choose to do this because we didn't want to send out many emails to you, but from the feedback we received, when it comes down to support issues, you don't mind getting an extra email or two

Fair enough really.

So members will now receive an email confirmation once they submit a question to a CSA agent ('Question received') and again when there is a response from an agent 'Resolved'/'further info needed' pointing them to their giffgaff messages page.

Please note as the data is updated hourly - a member will not receive confirmation straight away (so you could potentially already have a response, but not have had the email confirmation yet). Additionally if a member asks a question and it is resolved within the same hour they will just receive one email 'Resolved'. We still try and keep em to a minimum!

We now also have member satisfaction surveys, so you can let us know if we did well (pat on on the back) or if it all went horribly wrong (slap us in the face with a large trout) - these are sent only members where their incident has been closed for more than 2 hours (and haven't already received a survey request within the past 30 days).

So there you go, I hope this will make everything a bit clearer.

A big note to this is however, that we ONLY send out these emails to those members who have set that they don't mind us contacting them. If you have opted out, you will NOT receive any of these communications, as we'd like to continue to honour that agreement.

Cheers,

Vincent

[simon69c]

Great news - this is definitely something that was needed I think.

However I would just like to point out that it is rather unusual to treat email responses like this (and the payback points statements) as opt-outable, particularly when the opt out is tied to a checkbox marked "Give me info and offers about giffgaff".  For me that is the sort of generic privacy permission that I always try to avoid enabling as it is the sort of thing that normally means you will receive offers from the company involved - and I prefer not to receive that sort of thing (as well as not receiving them from 3rd parties).  However I absolutely want to receive emails that are directly related to my account, and that includes both support status emails and payback point statements.  With every other company I have ever dealt with I would always still get account-related emails but could opt out of marketing emails, which I expect is what most people will be expecting that checkbox to be about.

I think at the very least it should be made clear on the My details page that leaving the "Give me info and offers about giffgaff" box unticked will mean you won't receive emails from giffgaff about support progress and payback points, but preferably I think you should be treating them completely separately from potential marketing emails and either have a 3rd checkbox to cover account-related emails, or just have account-related emails on by default.

[vincent]

Thanks for the feedback Simon!

I will pass it on

[ivida]

It is nice that you introduce email messaging but fully agree with Simon:

i don't like to receive marketing info but i definitely want to get information

that relates to my account, especially if it is in response to my own request

(i.e. asking an agent). I would prefer if the two types of email would be handled

separately (i.e. opt-out for the first and no opt-out option for the latter).