giffgaff – The UK Telco Gets SocialCRM Better than Most: Globetrotting SocialCRM

Globetrotting to Europe, now, where mobile phones became prolific far before they made it to the US – let’s look to the UK, the birthplace of SMS / texting!  With that level of innovation, it shouldn’t be such a surprise, then, that innovation drives the UK company: giffgaff.

giffgaff

“The quintessential SocialCRM story and poster child in Europe is giffgaff.com, a UK mobile service provider that keeps prices low by supplying only a SIM chip to its customers, and then crowdsourcing the support,” according to Mark Tamis, a SocialCRM guru based in Paris.

Giffgaff is an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) operating across the O2 network. What that means, essentially, is that the operation of the mobile network is not a differentiator for the company, so they look to the customer experience playing a larger role in what makes their service and the brand: giffgaff and the tagline “The mobile network run by You.”

Further to Mark’s comments, he shared that giffgaff has won a 2010 B2C International Groundswell Award (awards in honor of Josh Bernoff and Charlene LI’s book on social growth “Groundswell”) for embracing the customer.

According to giffgaff founder Vincent Boon: “what really sets giffgaff apart is the fact that it really has no call center and all customer service (except for billing queries) is done by the online community. Active community members get rewarded for running parts of the business including answering questions in the community (majority within 5 minutes), attracting new members or helping to promote the company.”

Mr. Tamis also shared further innovative marketing by giffgaff: “They have social commerce by allowing customers to accumulate phone minutes and “goodies” when they onboard others from their social network.”  A novel concept, indeed! This proves that an innovation in SocialCRM may lie not only in the service one provides, but also in the way the community is rewarded for its participation.

Vincent Boon built an online forum to find out what people really wanted before he started giffgaff.  That input led directly to the creation of giffgaff, its community-led innovation, packages, offerings, pricing and more. It doesn’t get much more customer centric than that!