UPDATE: Hope you all had a great Christmas. The trial was successful. We saw far fewer struggles and agent cases fell with regards to activation. The improved activation flow will be made available to all over the coming days.
To get onto giffgaff, you need an active SIM. To make a SIM active, you need to activate.
Over the years, our activation pages have seen some changes, but we’ve been listening to your feedback and we have some big changes coming tomorrow that have been years in the making (I’m not exaggerating).
Voucher will be on the payment option page
Previously, you chose voucher on the very first step of the activation page. If you had a voucher but missed this option, you ended up going into the debit/ credit card activation and would then have to come back to the start to find the voucher option. Frustrating to say the least. We’re moving this choice to the payment page, where you’d expect it to be.
This puts it after goodybag selection, so…
You will be able to activate with a goodybag directly from a voucher
It’s taken a lot of work to bend giffgaff’s billing platforms in a way that they were never meant to bend. However, we knew this would make life much easier for voucher buyers, so we persisted.
If your voucher has enough credit, you’ll be able to buy any of our goodybags and enjoy the best value directly from activation. This wasn't possible previously. If top-up credit is your thing, you’ll still be able to choose top-up credit only.
If your voucher isn’t enough to buy your chosen goodybag, we will activate your SIM with credit and give you the chance to exchange it for a smaller goodybag.
Note that if your SIM gets £5 free credit, we can't take this into account for voucher goodybag activations as the credit is not always applied instantaneously. You can't buy a £15 goodybag straight from a £10 voucher with £5 free credit for example.
Topping up will become an optional step after activation
Given that only a small percentage of members topped-up at activation (less than 10%) and many new joiners found the concept of top-up credit confusing, we’ve removed it from the activation process if you're buying a goodybag.
We will continue to make it available however if you're buying a £5 or £7.50 goodybag and need to reach the £10 minimum spend to earn free credit.
Changes in a nutshell
Choose between card or voucher on the payment page
You can now buy goodybags straight from a voucher (finally!)
Top-up chatter is removed in most cases to avoid confusion
These changes will be trialled first before being rolled out
To make sure these changes are delivering the best experience and are working as expected, we’re going to be trialling these changes.
This involves randomly choosing members to be part of the new trial. We’re sorry if you’d like to be part of the trial and don’t get chosen, but if all goes well, these changes rolled out to everyone in the next few months.
Please try to avoid going into the activation flow if you don’t need to activate while the trial is running. We know you want a sneaky peek, but if we get many people leaving the new activation pages without activating, we might interpret the results as the changes not working well.
We’ll be continuing to look for activation improvements going into 2018 as well as making changes based on your feedback and the results from the trial.
Thanks for your patience while we’ve been working on these improvements. Be sure to leave a thanks to our developers if you think this is cool, drop a question or leave your feedback on how you think we could do even better next time.
Thanks,
Riaz
