The client:

Mobile telephone network giffgaff prides itself on its flexible ‘no contracts’ approach to customer service. It views its users as members, not customers, which are part of a wider community. The network was awarded the uSwitch Mobile Network of the Year 2017 award and boasts a Customer Satisfaction Index of 84.3, which is the highest of any telco company in the UK.

The challenge:

giffgaff’s optimisation manager, Riaz Ali, was tasked with improving user experience at every level of the network’s website. One particular focus was to make improvements to the existing address capture forms across all transactional pages, which was flagged as an area of concern.

The strategy:

Although giffgaff already had address verification technology in place, the existing user experience was poor, and was leading to a loss of orders.

To get to the route of the problem, Riaz and the team set up an extensive internal research project within the giffgaff customer base. The team performed a deep dive into Google Analytics and implemented a customer interaction analysis using website optimisation tool SessionCam. This research revealed that customers were not clicking on the ‘find address’ button after entering their postcode, rendering the address verification forms ineffective and leading to a significant cost in customer orders.

Riaz knew that giffgaff needed to find a new provider to prevent the network from losing out on custom. The team was impressed with the PCA Predict’s user interface design and ‘typeahead’ autocomplete functionality, which means that an address can more or less be entered from any angle, enabling a more natural search capability. As soon as a user starts typing a business name, street or postcode, PCA Predict’s Capture+ suggests results to auto-complete the address.

Typeahead technology reduces the time it takes for customers to complete address entry forms and obtain accurate address data with PCA Predict’s Capture+ technology, which enables real time address searching and validation – a much more more user friendly alternative to traditional postcode lookups. Capture+ works on any internet enabled device, from computers and tablets to smartphones and EPoS kiosks.

giffgaff set up a controlled A/B testing experiment within specific checkout pages using the PCA Predict address typeahead service. The first of these A/B tests ran for 15 days and tested almost 18,000 users. During these tests, giffgaff saw a huge improvement in SIM orders. Since implementing PCA Predict’s address verification technology, giffgaff saw a 25% increase in members verifying their address correctly at the first attempt compared to their previous provider. This increase in first time correct entries suggests that users prefer the more natural type ahead search functionality over the more rigid postcode entry.

The result:

Following the significant results revealed by the A/B tests, Riaz ensured that PCA Predict’s typeahead address verification technology was integrated across all of giffgaff’s transactional pages. Since implementing the service, the network has not only seen an increase in users inputting their address into the system first time around, but they have seen an uplift across the board on all transational pages. Riaz reported a 300% ROI since optimising the website’s address forms.