Over the last couple of weeks many of our members’ experience of giffgaff has been a long way below the standards they deserve. Our website has sometimes been slow with things like topping up and activation whilst in the background some of our processes such as applying queued goodybags haven’t completed successfully.
There has been a knock on impact on our member services team – they have seen a big increase in queries related to the above problems and as a result have taken longer than we’d like to work through all the replies.
So the purpose of this blog is to explain what's happened and what we're doing to put things right.
The root cause of these problems is the rapid growth in members joining giffgaff and whilst this is good news from the businesses point of view I am painfully aware that as an affected member this is of little comfort.
And I never want giffgaff to be a business that prioritises new customers over and above existing ones.
So what are we doing to rectify the situation?
- First of all we have stopped all of our direct response marketing – that’s the online ads and google search ads that drive new customers to our website. It means that we’ll connect fewer new customers but capacity for existing members should be increased so it will be easier to top up and view account details. We won’t re-start the marketing activity until we’re confident our service has improved.
- We have scheduled upgrades to a number of components of our system which will speed it up – the most impactful one of these is due to be in place in 2 weeks time.
- We have increased the number of agents in our contact centre by 20% - and we’ll keep these in place to cover for future growth.
- We have instigated a daily operational review process with our suppliers and work with them every day on numerous small improvements and also use it to ensure that any faults or process failures are quickly rectified.
- We will have a full blown operational review 1 week before we are due to launch Blackberry to ensure that we have a stable technical environment for it to launch into. If we haven’t we will delay the Blackberry launch until we do have stability.
I hope you appreciate from our actions that we are taking the current difficulties very seriously indeed and are doing everything in our power to put them right.
I will give another update in two weeks time on our progress. All that is left for me to do is to say sorry to anyone who has been affected and ask for their patience whilst we fix things.
