Lithys 2015: giffgaff - Support Savings MVP

Lithys 2015: giffgaff - Support Savings MVP

Company: giffgaffgiffgaff logo cropped.jpg

Entry submitted by: Gregg Baker (greggHead of Community

Community: giffgaff Community (http://community.giffgaff.com)

Lithy category: Support Savings MVP

 

 

giffgaff, founded 5 years ago and known as “the mobile network run by you”, utilizes Lithium to provide a first class experience for our members. At giffgaff we like to do things differently. We don’t believe in having shops on the high street, call centers you have to ring for help or generally just making life difficult for people. Instead we are online only and pass on the savings to our members.

 

‘giffgaff’ itself is an ancient Scottish word meaning mutuality and from day one we ensured we founded a business built on mutual relationships and understanding. We built the business around having a community at the heart of it, suggesting ideas, helping each other and keeping us real. This allows us to operate a very lean business and pass on the savings to our members. Lithium as a platform allowed us to facilitate that and evolve our thinking even further.

 

Our community provides first line support for our business by utilizing the Lithium platform. Members answer support questions, create knowledgebase articles and even create tutorial videos. We utilize standard platform features as well as embedding a tool to ask the community on our product pages. We empower our Community members to be powerful advocates for us, driving acquisition, while also giving them the tools and the channel to be our front line support. Reflect on that for a moment, our members provide all support for us (apart from private account related issues). As a result, we have seen a contact rate from our customers of once every five years.

 

Community members write the articles that go into our Knowledge Base, they help create the video tutorials taking members through difficult set ups and they are on hand to answer member questions, with an average response time of just 90 seconds (that's well under the average of 11 minutes for call centers). Typically tracked in minutes or even hours, our Community can solve a situation in seconds and then have that solution seen by at least 50 other people a month.

 

On average we receive 10,000-11,000 questions a month, of which the solutions are viewed at least 500,000 times a month. That’s a lot of giffgaff photo.jpgcalls deflected. We estimate savings in the region of $35M a year thanks to all of the amazing work our Community does. The best part is that members are happy with the responses they receive, in fact so happy we even picked up an award from ‘Which?’, that’s a pretty big deal here in the UK. We even found a way to add some giffgaff charm to that by letting one of our Community members go and accept the award on our behalf.

 

We truly believe we have a better way of providing customer service and so far satisfaction scores of over 80% would agree.

 

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Lithium Alumni (Retired)
Status changed to: 2015 Lithy Submission