With the school holidays now properly underway I thought it was time to give giffgaff an end of term report – and look forward to what’s in store for us over the rest of the year.
Giffgaff launched out of beta just over a year ago with our first (and so far only) offline advertising campaign featuring “the man” – remember him?
In the intervening year there have been lots of highlights – here are just a few...
- Half price goodybag sale.
- Introduction of giffgaff labs – and the Hokey Cokey goodybag.
- The facebook campaign to add more minutes to the £10 goodybag.
- Introduction of unique member URLs to help spread the word about giffgaff.
- The success of our Ask the Community and Ideas forum.
- Twitter and facebook integration into our online forum.
- Two really successful Payback cycles – culminating in one of our members earning £3,300.
- The launch of Unlockapedia – our guide to mobile handset unlocking.
- We have also grown the member base more than 30 fold over the last year and a bit – all whilst maintaining a very high customer satisfaction rating.
There were a few lowlights too – we removed the £30 goodybag too quickly and our service was below where it should have been in November’10 but I hope they are outweighed by the positive product changes we’ve made and the high service availability we’ve had in 2011 to date.
The thing that has given me the most satisfaction however has been the continued success of our community. We’ve seen it grow rapidly and contribute in ways we could only have dreamed possible before we started out on this venture. There can’t be a another business on planet who’s customers contribute in the same way – from answering queries, to distributing SIM cards and even to help test our new products and design our new packaging.
To every Member who has contributed – I salute you and thank you, from myself and all the team here at giffgaff.
And so what about the future?
Next up for us is data only goodybags – many members have been asking for these for a long time and I’m pleased to say that we’re making good progress – our tentative launch window is the latter half of August.
And the big one for the second half of the year is adding Blackberry support to our goodybags. We know this will be tremendously popular and are aiming to get it launched in the autumn.
Oh – and just in time for holidays we’re going to switch on data roaming – we’ve a release scheduled for Thursday night this week so data roaming will be live from Friday 29th July.
So enjoy your summer holidays safe in the knowledge that we’re beavering away to make giffgaff better.
As ever it would be great to hear your views on the last year – would your school report on giffgaff make Mum and Dad proud or would it skulk at the bottom of your schoolbag hoping to avoid detection?
