Submit: Great giffgaff Ideas

Here's a suggestion for a weekly giffgaff podcast. I prefer audio podcasts but video could work too.

 

Every day Hazel has been posting industry updates from the giffgaff insights manager. They range from new devices, network shenaigans and whatever's happening in the mobile industry. Giffgaff has a lot of people that work in the mobile industry that can have a pretty good jabber about stuff like that.

 

Weekly topic. There's always something to talk about in mobile. One week a segment about mobile gaming, the next about 4g,the week after. Network backhaul, mobile security, community projects, Google IO or the new iPhone, developing mobile apps. There's really an abundance of topics.

 

One of the biggest reasons for giffgaff not to do a podcast in the past is the singular topic; giffgaff. Thre's only so much you can talk about and a single topic each week doesn't allow for much scope. The industry update and the giffgaff staff in the industry is an excellent opportunity for a broad, expert podcast that can focus on all things mobile as well as all things giffgaff.

 

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The benefits are that it'd be good. Real insights from people in the industry about things going on in the industry as well as things going on at giffgaff. Also has the opportunity to get into podcast apps or iTunes and extend beyong the community as a reliable mobile news source.

 

The cost: Three or four Rode podcasters will cost you about £150 each, they're pretty much industry standard but the Blue snowball or the Blu Yeti are excellent microphones too. The best of budget microphones.

 

Probably a CDN to distribute the podcast. For only an audio podcast you're looking at a very low cost. Libsyn is a decent choice.

 

 

 

 

At the moment the existing lost SIM mechanism is advised in various pages such as help:

 

http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Help-Ask-the-community-got-stuck/How-do-I-report-my-phone-and-or-SI... and of course the main lost SIM page http://giffgaff.com/support/lost

 

- these pages do not inform those who are about to disable their SIM for several days of downtime that there is an alternative available i.e. SIM swap - which will disable the old SIM and enable a replacement in minutes. 

 

I can't see any reason not to do a SIM swap when a SIM is lost, other than not having a spare GG SIM available of course, and many Giffgaffers do have spares...

 

So the idea is:

 

Propose the SIM Swap as an alternative to the lost SIM approach wherever the lost SIM procedure is described in the Giffgaff web site

 

The benefits for those with a spare SIM handy are getting back up and running immediately instead of maybe a week without service - and the benefit to GG should be some saved money and effort in not having to process and post out a new SIM.

 

Good idea? Any reason I may have missed not to recommend this approach?

 

Edit - nate37 has pointed out that there may be some situations where a phone is stolen and needs to be blocked - so either the Lost SIM page could have a "block phone without blocking SIM" option added and/or perhaps Giffgaff could create an option in the SIM Swap page to "block a phone and perform a SIM swap".

 

p.s. for anyone who has not yet caught up with SIM swap - more info here

With the new £10 GB looming i think we need a new USSD Short code for finding an up to date figure for monthly data usage or remaining data usage in current GB.

 

Hope this is helpful to some peeps (Especially those who dont have access to specialized Apps to help monitor their data usage)

As someone who spends a lot of time on here reading posts on various boards, I have become more than a bit frustrated by certain changes to the full site. From what I've read on the various threads on the forum it seems I'm not alone 

 

The Problem

 

In the top right hand corner of each page (on the black background) used to reside two options. One to jump between any page I am on straight back to the "about me" page, and another that notifies me when I have recieved a PM.

 

On the new site these have been removed and have to be accessed by clicking on the community tab and scrolling down the right hand side to find them.

 

This extra faffing about makes the site less user friendly. Many members like to monitor the threads the post in and this website change makes doing that unnecessarily long winded

 

The removal of the "Inbox" option means that you don't see you have a private message unless you keep going back to your community page, where before the notifications appeared on whatever page you were on, again unnecessarily long winded.

 

The Solution

 

Put these options back on the website where they were

 

 

Yes, I know there are threads about the new website design and issues, and I know that oldyorkie has come up with a workaround (good work Neil), but for me and maybe others, key functionality has been removed from the website.

 

 

Can we have it back please?

 

There's been a discussion about auto renew goodybags (or re occurring goodybags) here

http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Contribute-Innovation-Promotion/Re-occurring-goodybags/td-p/3177383

What is suggested is the that queuing goodybags will end ( I think this was prompted by the recent updating goodybags problems
I'm guessing that giffgaff have realising this isn't sustainable) and re occurring goodybags will be intriduced but only by debit/credit card

This would be enormously inconvenient for people topping up by vouchers. Under proposed plans queuing goodybags or re occurring goodybags wouldn't be available

What I plan is to have a secondary balance within your account that you feed with airtime credit. ( perhaps an option to transfer airtime credit to your secondary re occuring goodybag bank ballance)
Once you add funds to this secondary balance ve this would feed the auto renew or re occuring goodybags,
I don't think re occuring goodybags from airtime credit would work so I've suggested having a secondary balance that you fund with airtime credit
Added suggestion. perhaps once you've set up the re occuring goodybag, you can add to your "goody bank" by an option on the top up line 43430. So you needn't,t go online at all

 

For anyone that hasnt noticed yet, the Community isn't operating at full strength.

 

If you haven't already visited "Are you listening?" http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Contribute-Innovation-Promotion/giffgaff-this-is-what-we-re-thinkin... yet, you need to go there straight away and have your say

 

As a former customer service boss myself, all managers need an "outside-in" perspective on their business.  What is the day-to-day community experience like? How does it feel to be a member right now? What's going well? Not so well?

 

As giffgaff has got bigger, some giffgaff staff have got too big for the Community.  They hardly ever post now

 

From what I can ascertain some staff have never posted - they don't even have a Community account from what I can see

 

That has to stop, right now!  When I was a customer service director I "walked the floor" for 30 minutes every day.

 

I'd talk to the cashiers. I'd open the door for customers. I'd pick litter up. I'd make sure the leaflet racks were stacked. I'd chat to customers queuing at the tills.  30 minutes, every day no matter how busy I was. 

 

I knew the business inside out. And my group of branches were regularly the top performing group in the country!

 

So, what's my idea?  I think it would be reasonable for EVERY giffgaff manager to spend 10-15 minutes on the community each day they're working. Just to say "Hi" and chat in off topic if they can't answer any questions! And to read 5-10 posts of what customers are saying.  Don't say you do - I've been keeping an eye on the time period between certain people logging in

 

I can assure you bit of visibility. A few nice words. A bit of interaction will go a long, long way.

 

I'm prepared to go the extra mile for giffgaff. Is giffgaff's management team prepared to do the same? Come on we can rebuild this Community. Together

 

Hi all,

 

There have been recent complaints about the lack of moderation overnight on the forum, and while I don’t agree that employing someone overnight just to remove details etc., I feel this idea would work, and would be a lot cheaper too.

 

The proposal:

 

When a post gets over  10¹ reports in a certain period of time, the reported post  automatically gets moved within the hours of 11pm and 8am for review, this could be moved to a ‘quarantine’ board where the post is no longer public, but is flagged to the educators² when this happens a notification is sent to the original poster that the post will be reviewed at 8am in the morning, and depending on the nature of the post, will either return, or be removed.  

 

 

What will this solve?

 

• Abuse on the forum overnight (spam, racist content, or whatever users may post)
• Quick removal of posts with personal details for them to be edited in the morning
• Shows care, stopping members from moaning about not enough measures taken
• Gives users peace of mind – knowing their content has been removed and will be looked at.
• Saves educators such as Hazel22 (and the rest of the team) from getting up at 3am to remove it.
• Prevents serious spam attacks to the forum
• Arguments from who should be allowed to edit posts and move posts.

How will this work?

 

When several users report a post as inappropriate at the times of 11pm until 8am via the ‘report inappropriate content’ link (see above for image) the post is moved automatically and a notification is sent

Abuse – This could easily be abused, but from my understanding the system reports one report per user? So the abuse isn’t there, because only one report from one user will count, not ten reports from one user.

 

Sounds too complex?

 

Yes, but from my understanding the basic functionality is there, when you get a new rank, you get an email, Lithium (forum software) triggers this, it’s automated. So the same feature could be applied here. The report inappropriate content links are there, the hidden moderation panel is there where the posts can be submitted for review, it just requires lithium to embed the automation part where posts can be moved automatically.

 

Thank you for reading this idea, I hope together we can all make this community stronger!

 

 

 Pssstt... Want to improve giffgaff further?

 

Don't forget to tell giffgaff what ideas you like best: http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/News-Announcements/Take-action-to-improve-giffgaff-Ideas-4-3-14/m-p...

 

 

 

 

 

This idea is the culimation of a lot of discussion of late on the Suggestions board (see here and here). Following a lot of support in those thread, this proposal is now being submitted to the Idea board.

 

Please note that this idea builds on one already submitted by Styly in 2011 (see it here).  His original idea was partially implemented before being vaulted.  This new Idea expands on the original proposal, which, given it's age, should be open for reviewing anyway.

 

Background

The general concenus of late is that the Help section of the forums is suffering badly at the moment: which makes for a poor user experience, especially for new comers to GiffGaff.  The are a lot of duplicate threads, making finding existing help difficult. Beyond that, questions are being quite poorly asked, which in turn is attracing a lot of poor answers (short, often copy & pasted).

 

The Idea

The idea is for GiffGaff to modify the process when you want to post a new topic in the Help forum. There are three distinct changes to the current process (which is currently "Go to Help" -> "New Message")

 

• New Button

The "New Message" button at the top of the Help forum should be replaced with one saying "Need Help?"

 

• Knowledge Base Search

Instead of going straight to posting a new message, people would be forced to search the Knowledge Base first.  Once a user has tried this (whether they get results or not), they are then shown the option to make a new post

  

• Posting Tips

The New Message form for the Help section should be changed to include some helpful hints about how to ask a 'good' question.

 

Reasoning

The first change, whilst small, is a sutle one to get people into the mindset of there being more help options that just posting a message.  It also helps to stop confusion of people clicking a New Message button and being sent to search the Knowledge Base

 

The second change would remove a large amount of the new help requests that are made every day. There are countless requests for help with settings, sim sizes, tethering and coverage. All these things are covered, in depth, in really well written articles. It's just that people are inherently lazy, and need to be made to look for them first.

 

The final change would hopefully result in a better standard of question. This would not only allow the Asker to get the answer they want quicker, it may also result in a generally better standard of answer being supplied.

 

Demo

I've thrown together a little demo of the process.  It's a little slow, and probably doesn't work too well (or at all) in some mobile browsers, but hopefully it serves to illustrate the process.  If nothing else, it highlights actually how good the knowledge base content is, and why it needs to feature more prominently as part of the entire help system offered by GiffGaff.

 

The demo can be found here - http://gg-demo.geekcubed.org/

 

Technical notes below (mainly for GiffGaff staffer's)

 

I think it would be good if there was an option to delete goodybags so you could buy a new one (before the month is up), especially when your minutes are low. This was a problem on my old network too, I had to wait a few days before topping up again because the 'bundle' hadn't expired yet.

 

Also, I can't see why networks don't have this option. My friend and I were talking about giffgaff the other day and he said he needs to top up again as he's used his minutes already, but this was only after 15 days. Sometimes people have months where they overtalk and need to top up again.

Afternoon all

 

I would like to propose that giffgaff revisit the idea of being able to manage email subscriptions, so members can find and organise those threads they want updates on more easily.  I have 29 pages of thread subscriptions and want to delete some however this is very time consuming as there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for the order it is currently in.

 

This idea has been posted before back in 2011 by wollac11 http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Submit-Great-giffgaff-Ideas/Email-subscriptions-sorting-amp-search/.... However it didn’t get taken forward because it didn’t reach the magic number of 10 kudos (I know we now need 20 kudos!) so it is currently in the ideas vault.

 

However, should it receive sufficient interest giffgaff will revisit it

 

From when I have posted this in contribute http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Contribute-Innovation-Promotion/Wouldn-t-it-be-good-to-manage-our-t... the consensus is that some sort of organisation would be useful. Thanks mr_mitch, philiplittle40 and sanwich for your comments  

 

I think it would be useful to have the option of ordering posts by:

• Chronological order by OP or the most recent post
• The type of forum e.g. blog, contribute, off topic, help etc.
• Those threads marked solved/unsolved (applicable threads only)
• Alphabetical by subject/title/keyword

I’ve also posted this on the developers hub thread to see if anyone knows if this is possible http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Contribute-Innovation-Promotion/Developers-Hub-Get-Involved/td-p/77....  I still don’t know the answer to this yet and won’t get a response from giffgaff until this idea is posted here and gets enough support with 20 kudos.

 

So, what do you think?  Comments most welcome, whether you support the idea or not  

 

Thanks everyone,

 

N4tz

This idea was brought up by several posts earlier (see 1,2) and Vincent has even posted

a partial solution, but apparently it hasn't yet made it to this page.

 

The proposal is to have the possiblity to handle more than one SIMs from

a single account. This would be useful for companies, families, couples

and any other groups, if handling of the SIMs' administration/finances

is performed by one person.

 

The point is not necessarily to have only a single account for the SIMs,

i understand that at the moment the system requires the creation of an

account for each SIM.

 

The point is much more to have the possibility to define a master account from

which you can access relevant settings of all the SIMs within the associated pool.

Not only to top-up (this is not a problem as you can top-up any number through

the giffgaff pages) but also to activate/inactivate  auto top-up or set speding limits, etc.

 

Another important aspect of a company/family pool os SIMs would be to handle the

credits more flexibly: to have the possibility to transfer credit from one SIM to

the other.  Tthere was some discussion about  implementing some form  of credit

transfere on giffgaff (1,2) - in my opinion company/family SIM pools would be a good

argument to push such a feature and also an excellent context for the development

and testing.

 

Call Catcher gives you the facility to find out who has called if your phone has been out of coverage or switched off. Once your phone has coverage or is switched on, you will receive a text message telling you who called and the time/date.

 

Kudos this if you would want this feature.

In response to the thread Should/Could calls to 101 be free on giffgaff, I'd like to propose this idea:

 

If the phone has credit, irrespective of any goodybag, the 15p charge is applied as normal.

 

If there is no credit, but a goodybag is in place with minutes, a charge of 2 minutes is applied to the goodybag, irrespective of call duration. (Why 2 minutes? Voicemail is 8p or 1 minute.)  That would allow callers who only use goodybags and no credit to be able to call 101 if they need to.

There are a handful of useful forum searches that I use on regular basis and it would be nice to have these easier to access and use. 

 

For instances all your own accepted solution can be found using this method as posted by darrenpainter which requires changing the user id to your own to get a personalised list of accepted solutions. http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/giffgaff-Top-Tips/List-your-Solutions-by-post/td-p/3763293

 

There are also other useful searches to find threads and posts authored as posted by sloz here.

http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/giffgaff-Top-Tips/View-own-posts-and-topics-in-a-particular-forums/...

 

All these links are simple searches but currently require that you manually change the user id to your own.

 

So my idea is to included a link on the My settings which then links to a simple widget with a clickable list of the various searches (inserting your own id into the relevant place).

 

 

 

Personalised Search Widget

Simply click the following links to get your own personalised searches.

 

• Accepted Solutions
• Topics posted in Help Forum
• Posts in Help Forum
• Ideas posted
• Idea comments posted
• Topics posted in Contribute Forum

etc, etc.

 

I think this should be easily possible with the help of the Dev Hub team and I've been encouraged to post this as an idea by alex_w (so giffgaff seem interested). 

 

So comments and support gratefully welcomed

 

 

ok so following on from this discussion in contribute

http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Contribute-Innovation-Promotion/Duplicates-here-there-and-everywher...

hazel pointed out that lithium's own forum has a built in search when typing a subject title to a post

so the idea is that when your making a new post and typing the title this search will bring up previous threads with similar words within it

this may hopefully reduce the amount of duplicates we see but also create a better experience for us as members.

rather than my initial suggestion of limiting it to the idea and top tips it could perhaps be rolled out across all forum sections but that will be up to giffgaff to decide if its needed in all or just a few

my only issue is that i dont know if its a mobile friendly feature, if its not then oh well it will still be very beneficial.

Hi all, there's a few ideas about community badges for completing tasks and doing things in the community (for example Marys here) but this is a little different. Various sites like Dropbox have a tutorial based achievement feature where you're rewarded for completing tasks associated with the core functionality of the service. 

 

Would it be feasible for giffgaff to have something similar? In Dropbox it's in a section labelled getting started and works on the idea of issuing challenges to the user, for giffgaff it could be:

 

• set up a reccuring goodybag,
• queue a goodybag,
• post in the community,
• give a kudos or accept a solution
• Access giffgaff.com on a mobile
• Follow us on Twitter/Facebook or share your refferal link.

Or things to that effect, challenges or achievements designed to introduce new users to the features and functionality of the mobile side as well as the community side. Below is the Dropbog getting started section using a challenge/ reward system as a tutorial.

 

 

And another similar example on the Steam platform

 

 

I couldn't speculate on the cost or effort involved in this but it would ideally be a part of the giffgaff.com member dashboard (so not reliant on Lithium).

 

The benefits are that you could immediately make new members aware of and using features such as reccuring goodybags, immediately get them posting and accepting solutions/kudosing on the community and sharing giffgaff on Twitter. Anything you'd want to encourage and think new members ought to know upon joining.

 

The reward could if you wanted follow Dropbox and offer traditional rewards (possibly payback points?) but could just as easily be a badge based rewards system. Leave a half finished challenge on someones dahboard with empty badge spaces and 90% of people will want to fill it and find their way around the site and features nicely.

How about a £12 voucher for the increaseed price.

Ant

Is there any chance that giffgaff are able to implement the pop up 'info panel' option when you hover over a members name.

I have seen this used on another mobile network's Lithium based community site beginning with V

 

 

This would offer an 'at a glance' way of seeing members community details when browsing threads without the need to click away from the thread being read, and could actually be used as an alternative to the profile badges that did end up spliting community opinion down the middle.

 

This could tie in quite nicely with the planned refresh of the community page 'look and feel' that is aiming for a cleaner and more streamlined view of the community.

Very simple idea this, and probably easy to implement.

 

Recently I had the need to block calls to premium rate numbers. 

 

I've just found out that international calls are also blocked as a result of this.

 

I have been informed that blocking calls to premium rate numbers also blocks international calls, it's either block both, or block neither.

 

My idea is therefore simple:

 

Allow members to block calls to premium rate numbers, but don't block international numbers as well.

 

This is particularly relevant giffgaff's new international pricing, which may attract new members who wish to call abroad.

 

All the best

 

Graham.