If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best New Community & Most Innovative Community
Community: Giff Gaff
Launch Date: October 15, 2009
Submitted by: Giff Gaff Community Manager, Vincent
I'm nominating the giffgaff community because since the day we launched, the community has not stopped baffling me with its behaviour. Never have I met a community which is so extremely on topic, which fulfils the role it was set up for so completely, where we cannot detect any spam and where the users are so extremely helpful to each other I feel positively nauseated :smileyhappy:
giffgaff was specifically set up to get its community involved in all aspects of the business (mobile phone network). So we launched our community even before our product was available, in order to start gathering feedback on what we would launch.
After launch, the community was to take up the role of our customer service (which they did tremendously well) and continue to provide feedback on our product and service.
We have no call centres at all, as all our customers questions are answered by our community (except for billing). This has worked so well that since launch we've only had to escalate two questions in total, out of the hundreds posted by our members (questions get automatically escalated after 24 hours with no reply). And we've had an average response time of 900 minutes to any questions posted in January, which is just incredible.
We're working very hard to make sure the community feels involved with giffgaff and everything we do. This shows in our participation rates (in January an amazing 30% of newly registered users visited our community pages) and in how we've attracted super users, one of whom spends seven hours a day, seven days a week answering questions.
But don't take my word for it, the community also feels our approach is different and sets us apart from the majority. Here are two choice quotes:
tamino wrote:
You've answered my questions faster than if often takes to get through to a human in a call centre. Member service 1, call centres 0!
trick202:
GG has the potential to be different. They could almost do with a Che image on the site - and a Rage Against the Machine track playing!
If you think the Giff Gaff community is worthy of winning Best New Community, then give it a vote. Voting is open on the Lithosphere until the end of March this year. Winners will be announced at the LiNC customer conference. Read our blog for more information on the Social CRM Excellence Awards
