The Pioneer interview with...Ash Schofield
Ash Schofield was CMO and now CEO at giffgaff, a business conceived 12 years ago with the aim of seeing whether a mobile network inspired by social media and digital collaboration could create value in new and better ways for a segment of the market. The approach has been very human, with a different set of beliefs about customers creating a sense of ownership born out of mutuality – members helping other members and so saving on the costs of service, their commitment to the company leading to members finding new ones by word of mouth, saving yet more. The mutual principles are central to the way the business is run with member consultation on even the trickiest issues such as price rises. They underpin what is still a successful growth story and at the end of 2021, giffgaff had 3.7m customers and revenue of over £500m.
What does being a customer pioneer mean to you?
I’ve been in the industry for 24 years now, when I first started in 1999, Nokia was the most popular handset manufacturer. In 2009, giffgaff was born based on the idea that people deserved better from the Telecoms industry. Banking was still ranking higher for satisfaction than Telecoms despite the 2008 financial crash. Surely people needed better from an industry that is about being connected. We wanted to have a relationship with our audience based on mutual benefit. Members who felt a sense of belonging and not just customers with a transactional relationship. With this in mind, we launched our Community before we even launched our business. The desire to do better for customers was baked into our plans from the start. That’s what being a customer pioneer is, spotting where people deserve better and getting on and doing something about it, not just talking about it. Action is critical, and to keep that in mind I always go back to the thought ‘our best stories should always be in front of us not behind us’.
How did giffgaff actually make that happen?
Having got people into the Community and into a conversation, we needed to find roles for them so they could contribute to helping us build the better way we were all seeking. We had to think, ‘how do we want to partner with our audience?’. We found that they were willing to be helpful to other giffgaff members. Members were getting 90 second responses to their questions, rather than the industry standard of an 18 minute or so wait to talk to an agent. The Community was also leading on advocacy with members often sharing sim cards and recommending giffgaff to people they know. Eventually, we reached 250,000 Community users per month, but over time our platform wasn’t good enough. We were using someone else’s technology and it didn’t have the flexibility we needed. We tried another provider, and it still wasn’t quite right, so the Community Product team came to us with the idea to create our own solution. We loved the idea and partnered with our giffgaff members to help along the way, with them giving their opinions, helping prioritise features and testing prototypes. It’s a good example of us acting on what we believe in, and perhaps explaining the distinction we make between members and customers. Having software engineers talk directly to members is just not something that happens that often in other companies, but it should. In our experience, it promotes understanding amongst our members of how the business works and helps our engineers really connect with the needs of the people that will be using the features they build.
As we moved from a mobile-first mindset to an app-set mindset, we also set about upgrading our app in a giffgaff way. We have seen giffgaff lead the market on NPS for years, but our app wasn’t the best ranked in the market and we weren’t happy with that. We wanted the best for our members. We again used their input to help us craft the app to their liking and within a year giffgaff was topping the ranking for telcos on the Apple & Google app stores.
How do you keep the desire to do better for customers alive?
Some things early on are instinctive and just happen naturally when you’re new and trying to do something different in the industry. To keep this going I think you have to keep going back to those original thoughts and keep improving. Find new ways to articulate where you are as a brand, figure out where you can make changes and challenge your own ideas. We also make sure that we’re hiring the right people. There can be a danger that when people leave that you lose the great pioneering company attitudes that you had.
How do you know you’ve got the right people?
There are many different roles to be carried out in the business and we treat each part of the business differently. It’s much easier to be pioneering and creative when you work in the marketing department versus the legal team. Despite this, our legal team are great enablers and allow for pioneering ideas to come to fruition. I’d say you know you’ve got the right people when everyone is on board and they’re contributing and facilitating progress.
What does your research look like, do you use your community?
The Community members are always a great source of feedback and ideas but to get a full view of the needs of the wider audience we need to supplement their input with market data. We can’t just research the people who have already chosen giffgaff, we also need to understand the needs of those who haven’t chosen us (yet). The main aim is to find out how we can help take people who are aware of us into considering us as their next provider.
The marketing team has a massive role in giving insights on unmet needs, but most businesses will make a product based just on this data alone. At giffgaff we think it’s important to continue to listen and interact throughout the development process, giving prototypes for the Community to test and inform decision making. And then post-launch, it’s really a continued journey of product discovery to keep pushing to delight our members.
Can you pioneer for everyone?
We have our design targets and then recognise the secondary benefits we give to other market segments. People engaged in telco often opt for giffgaff as a savvy choice for both value and values. Those individuals then recommend us and give sims to those in their circle who may know less about which provider is best and are happy to take advice. It’s not a smart move to target everyone but it’s certainly possible to appeal to a broad range of people.
Why don’t more people become pioneers?
Before I was at giffgaff I thought I was customer-centric, but then I got here and realised that there’s a whole other level that I hadn’t seen. I think some people just don’t know what to look for to reach that next level and there is definitely a level of bravery required to find it.
It’s also easy to trip up. I remember when I first joined giffgaff we made a mistake and stopped Maestro payments without listening to our Community members first. Only about 3% of people used them, but we faced a backlash from the Community because it looked like we didn’t care. We quickly reversed the decision and got the opportunity to demonstrate that we listen and where possible will act. Advocacy is important to us and so listening and finding mutual benefit with our members is crucial.
How did you tackle the challenge of moving from CMO to CEO?
I started by asking whether we were new or old as a business as we approached our tenth birthday. As a digital-first business from inception some of our code had become hard to work on and our infrastructure as a whole was aging. Our conclusion was we were becoming an old-new business. To get back to being new-new, we started to invite people in from other companies that we respected. One example was Monzo, who I think innovate in a similar way to us, just in a different sector. It’s tough for Monzo as the big banks can copy them and with a lot more funding so they must constantly stay cutting edge. It’s good to spend time with other great brands, absorbing and thinking more broadly about where you look for inspiration.