What we are co-creating with our members

When you think of giffgaff, what comes to mind? Run by you? Mutuality? Community? Good value? For me, I think about collaboration with members. They’re pretty awesome people when you get to know them and they have some great ideas and feedback to share. Nice one.

Managing the giffgaff pioneers' community has given me the pleasure of meeting our wonderful members. Everyone has a unique story to share, but the one thing we all have in common is our passion and desire to get involved and keep giffgaff the mobile network run by you.

I talked a little bit about why we are run by you in my first giffgaff pioneers blog so this time I’m going to share more behind the scenes of the bits and bobs you’ve been co-creating with us and why it’s important to giffgaff.

What is co-creation?

Co-creation is a fancy word, lots of businesses use it to describe the process of collaborating with their customers. Or in our case, members. We’ve actually been doing this since before giffgaff launched as a network, back when it was just a community. Our members share their ideas and we worked on them together. They actively give us valuable feedback and we listen, and improve their experience.

So let me dive right in and share what we have been co-creating with our members this month.

Chatting about Payback

Payback is our way of saying thank you to our lovely members. They can earn it by helping others on the community forums, giving us ideas and feedback, creating content and by recruiting more members. They can then redeem their Payback via credit, cash or give it as a donation to charity.

Payback was first introduced when giffgaff launched back in 2009 and 10 years on, we wanted to find out what’s working and what’s not with our current reward model.

Do most of our members know about it? Is the reward worth the effort? What would payback look like in an ideal world if it was reinvented? We asked several members who do and don’t earn Payback these very questions and they helped us understand what Payback is for them.

We found out a few really interesting things. It is generally known that giffgaff gives Payback to members. They love that they can give their Payback to charity and that giffgaff doubles it, but it’s not easy to earn Payback if they don’t have spare time to actively help on the community. They also said that waiting 6 months is a bit too long, when it comes to redeeming their Payback and somewhere around every 3 months would be more appropriate.

What happens next you ask? We need to do more research and ask more members these questions, so we are building a survey to gather even more feedback. We’ll crunch through all the results when we’re done and let everyone know what we found out. So more to come on this particular subject in the future. Exciting.

Help just got easier

Last month we asked over 50 members to help us re-categorise some of our knowledge base articles based on instinct, which I talked about briefly in my previous blog. This is super important because we don’t have a call centre for members to dial when they are in a spot of trouble.

In June, we invited some members into the office to test the new help journey. We wanted to see if they were able to find the help they needed within a few specific situations. Situations that some members typically stumble across.

While it’s still a bit early to officially announce any results from the research, it’s safe to say every bit of feedback from our members has been incredibly helpful and we’re continuing to make the Help journey even better with some giffgaff pioneers by our side.

Choosing to be a superstar

As well as collaborating with us on making giffgaff even better, our members are our superstars in other ways too. Co-creation is relatively new in the content marketing world. For us, collaborating with members with our advertising shines a light on them and we couldn’t be more proud and excited to share their stories with the world.. After all, we wouldn’t be giffgaff without them.

Our giffgaff pioneers are featured in our latest campaign all around the UK and on our social media pages. How cool is that? You might have seen some of our superstars, Leslie-Ann and Haydn, in the London underground.

You both look marvellous.

As mentioned, when members pop into our office for testing or workshops they also get a chance to be featured on our social media timelines. It’s another way for us to say thanks for their time and sharing their feedback from the research we are carrying out.

When asked and given the chance to be famous, most jump at the opportunity. I mean, who wouldn’t? Here’s Nalin getting some social stardom in the month of June on Instagram. You’re the bee’s knees.

But wait, there’s more

This blog has only highlighted 3 things we’ve been co-creating with our members this month. We’ve also been improving our IVR system, making the ordering and activating a SIM experience even better, and chatting to members who use giffgaff for their business to find out how we can make their lives easier. In the online world, there have been ongoing polls in our Facebook group, and continuous discussions on the online community forums too.

Being able to co-create with our members is pivotal in keeping giffgaff run by you, and having our members at the heart of everything we do is the cherry on top. We are pleased as punch to collaborate with them.

Thank you

I just want to say a huge, huge thank you to all our members who have co-created with us in big and small ways in the month of June. Tune in next month to read on about more projects giffgaff has been co-creating with members.