Life, The Universe and The Agent Team

adele_s · ‎02-02-2012

Hi Everyone,

Let me introduce myself as some of you will have already been chatting to me or in contact with me before now! My name is Adele, and I have recently joined giffgaff as the Member Services Delivery Manager - although I have been helping out in giffgaff for quite some time.

What do I do, I hear you say? Well, my role is to manage and deliver customer services to you all, so my main task is managing and improving the Member Services team who deal with your cases raised via Ask an Agent.

As you are well aware, the Member Services team have had a lot of challenges over the last couple of months. As giffgaff has grown, so has the number of people needing help, and the number of and complexity of cases we work on. However they have worked really hard to bring the volume down and are now working well within service levels.

Over the next month we will be introducing the team to you again, as it has been a while since they have been on the forums so you will get a chance to say hi to them. Along with a series of blogs to explain a bit more about what Agents do and what case they see, we will be asking for ideas and improvements (the same way we do for everything at giffgaff) on our overall customer services to help us provide you with customer service excellence.

Over the last month, we have worked hard to make improvements within the team. One of the first steps we took was to increase the number of members on the team. These new Agents have all completed their training and are now live working on your cases. It will take a little while for them to settle down (everyone is new once!), and they are doing really well currently and loving the giffgaff life J Now that the team is bigger and giffgaff overall is bigger, we will be looking at areas like updating training and improving the overall quality of the team.

The first big launch and change for this year is the go-live of Blackberry services (very exciting!) which is now with you. The team have completed their training and are ready to rock and roll!! Another big change which will help the management of cases is a new Ask an Agent form which is currently being developed, and I will keep you updated with more information and when this will launch. This new form will ask you more questions about your issue, and you will have to select some mandatory fields. This is by no means to limit people asking questions in any way - these new fields in the form will help us identify the issue you are facing quicker. As the new form is not launched as of yet and in order for us to identify Blackberry cases in the queues can you complete the following when raising an ask an agent case for Blackberry issues:

If you need to submit a case on Blackberry related issues:

Select the category – “Mobile services” and place in the subject line “Blackberry”.

Should you have an issue that could possibly be related to your Blackberry handset, make sure you check out the fab Blackberry simulators on the below link in the FAQ’s; they give a walk through on how to setup your handset and you can even check where to find your settings.

Blackberry Simulators: http://support.giffgaff.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/664

Blackberry FAQs in our Help Section: http://support.giffgaff.com/app/home/kw/blackberry

Ask The Community!: http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Help-Ask-the-community-got-stuck/bd-p/QA1

As normal, the team will only be supporting sim/account based queries (things that require sim technical support on a network level, or that involve personal information to your account). If the simulator above hasn’t helped with your queries, we also have a great set of FAQS and of course the community on hand to help. Using these can often get you the answer you require very quickly if it’s a handset, settings or basic query that doesn’t require an answer from the Agent team.

In the future, the Member Services team will have monthly blogs so you can meet and catch up with all the team and help us with improving our service. It's great being on board and I look forward to getting to know and work with you all!

Adele

darkrage · ‎10-02-2012

Well this will be a massive step forward for the better, and will be interesting to see unfold.

thank you

redux · ‎14-02-2012

What massive step forward?

Agents might not reply to support cases for weeks, educators might not be able to get anything on their chases for updates, Craig and Adele and others might not read or reply to personal messages on here, and the complaints email address might be connected to a terminal at the South Pole for all the use it is.

Now, of course it may be that events which cause that sort of thing are not common, but they need to define some ways of handling them.

jujujinx · ‎25-02-2012

Hi Adele

I have had no service all day - have topped up more - no goody bag available cannot receive calls - cannot make calls using my credit. What is the point of having a phone service that you cannot use? There is no point of getting more ,members if you are unable to have basic service - this is not good. HELP PLEASE I NEED TO MAKE AND RECEIVE URGENT CALLS!!

thanks

rkgreen · ‎02-03-2012

The Agents .......... What do they actually do??????????

Here is my latest question to the "Agents"

I don't understand what is going on here. I started the "process" of joining GiffGaff when my friend applied for a sim for me at the beginning of last month. I activated the sim, and topped it up on the 11th Feb with a £10 voucher, but the sim did not work, reporting that it was locked. You sent me a second sim with the message "Thanks for ordering an extra sim" on the 14th Feb, that sim did not work and when I asked for help you told me that the second sim was a NEW not a replacement sim (If it was a new sim then why would it NOT activate anyway but with a different number?) You then have informed me on the 23rd Feb that my replacement sim is on its way, could be next day but may be up to 3 working days. It has not arrived.

I have a tablet pc and want a sim for data and was considering GiffGaff, however as it stands at the moment, I feel that for some reason you do you not want my business.

Why?

redux · ‎04-03-2012

Adele

There is very little point in you asking to phone me up to discuss anything, if you aren't going to read my replies.

The public promise about responding to the complaints email address is not being realised, well I don't think so.

I suggest that the firm would be making a mistake if it is allowing itself a week for each response. Even if it takes a week for the initial reply, people will expect that once a case has been opened it is going to progress a little faster, especially if the problem has been going on for a few weeks.

redux · ‎02-04-2012

I think it would be interesting to hear a bit more about some of those problems faced by agents.

For instance what causes the agents to get no feedback from technical teams for 7 weeks, or a customer to receive no reply on a complaints case for 2 weeks?

annhenry · ‎07-12-2015

OK so i'm elderly and probably stupid in your eyes, but I have contacted an agent twice with my problem. They answered once, and keep refering to the one answer they sent. However they still have not solved the problem. So please how do I get them to talk to me or pay attention to what I write? Thank you for your help, Ann in sunny Brecon

siseleanor · ‎24-05-2017

I don't know how to get help here, as the situation is confusing. I believe I paid for a one month £20 goodybag which gave me unlimited minutes and bb -critically important because I'm in the middle of moving house - but after only 16 days its telling me I've no credit left to make an inland phone call. I've no idea what I did wrong, or how to put it right, can't afford to make a mistake and keep throwing money at giffgaff for something that doesn't work, so I"m going to have to head out into town and get a new sim ona contract with another company. Absolutely gutted,I thought giffgaff was great until this happened and there was no way even to find a screen to say how much I can still even send texts or use phone as a hotspot. Disaster for us here.