How we're the mobile network run by you

Since giffgaff launched nearly 10 years ago, it has always inspired to be a people powered network. In fact, giffgaff had an online community forum of members before the network even launched. It was a bold move but these founding members brought to life the mobile network run by you.

Every day the community buzzes with life. Where our members give help and support, post ideas, give feedback and get involved in various projects staff are working on. However not all of our members tune in to the community forum. So we were set up with a challenge to create a panel of members who will work side by side with our community members.

We began this journey in 2018 and now we have nearly 7000 members who can proudly call themselves giffgaff pioneers. (The name was also chosen by members.) These members have been hard at work helping by answering surveys, usability testing, polls, phone calls, live discussions and workshops. The projects they help with vary from goodybag terminology, the community platform, different messaging on the site, and labs.

I want to say a huge thank you from all of us at giffgaff for everything so far.

Let’s recap over some of the bits and bobs we’ve been collaborating on.

A new way of working

We kicked off 2019 learning about an agile way of working. Here we’re calling it ‘Lean UX’. Our product teams had a week long exercise to learn and adopt this mentality to support daily updates and releases, where Steve, CTO, talks about here. He wrote “You’ll have access to new features and fixes as soon as they’re coded and have a chance to tell us what you think much more quickly.”

This is where 20 marvellous members spoke to our teams over the phone and gave us some brilliant insights that helped give direction and solve some problems our product teams were facing.

Adam, a giffgaff scrum master, spoke to a member called Nathan who gave us loads of help around declined payments. This opened up new experiments for the team to experiment with the messaging we use if a payment is declined. Resulting in less members needing to raise cases to our agents. Thanks Nathan

Making the knowledge base knowledgeable

It’s super important to make finding help easy, simple and accessible. Members from all backgrounds took part in a sorting exercise, where they helped categorise the articles. And the pioneers played a key part in this discovery. Top job, folks.

Community Help Team Lead, Anton has been crunching the results. He’s found a general agreement where to put the majority of articles, which means we’ll be moving soon to new categories. But there’s more work to be done with your help so watch this space. Very exciting.

Members visiting our gaff

Talking face to face to our members is one of the best ways to get under the hood and really discover what our members think and feel, and how we can improve the giffgaff service. We’ve had some of our members pop in to our swanky new gaff to have a chat with our product design teams.

An exercise they helped with was looking at SIM packaging design. We wanted to know which versions are more eye catching when popped through your letterbox.

Another exercise they were involved in, was to test a new way to buy a phone, to make the experience simpler. And a third, was to discuss the different ranges of phones that we sell.

Brian, a giffgaff pioneer said “It was an absolute pleasure for me to meet you and the other team members.” and Richard, also a giffgaff pioneer said, “My experience was amazing! Getting to see what goes on behind the scenes and the people who put it all together was awesome. Also being able to share my voice and opinions about ideas moving forward was rewarding as I will be helping fellow giffgaffers in the future.”

Come get involved

Inviting members to our digs is really fun, and we want to keep the conversations going. Do you want to give us a helping hand? Check out the available dates and sign up below. We’d love to meet you.

It’s been a fun ride so far and this is only the beginning. I’m really excited to keep our doors open with opportunities for our members to get involved and continue the run by you legacy. Tune in next month to see what new things giffgaff pioneers have been getting up to.