An online chat that responds quickly

I realise that in theory that you have this.
I also realise that it can get very busy.
However, it is very very frustrating to need to unblock your card and see that the message is ‘Not read’ and ‘this may take up to an hour for a response’.

So my super original suggestion is that you either do not pretend to have a response system or have one that actually responds within a reasonable period, such as say a minute or two. NOT AN HOUR!

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Unfortunately, Customer Operations are currently in a situation where the growth of Monzo’s userbase has outpaced the growth of the team.

Have a read of this thread for some of the things that Monzo are doing to bring wait times back down.

The latest Open Office presentation was also on this very subject of scaling up customer operations.

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but you can unfreeze your card in the app?

also, they have acknowledged they’re finding it hard to keep up

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Monzo’s customer base has gone through the roof, a lot quicker than even most of us expected!

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Hi Jim,

I would like to apologise for the delay it took to respond to your enquiry and we appreciate your feedback. We’re currently hiring a number of new frontline support staff with the goal of reducing our response times. We completely agree with you and we are striving to get instant responses. In addition to this we are making improvements to the “Help” section of the app in order to answer the most common queries, like how to unblock your card, without needing to speak to a team member.

If you have any additional feedback I would be more than happy to discuss them with you.

Regards,
Emma

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I have had a very mixed experience, I have had queries that took a few hours but Leah actually replied to my message the other day before I was able to close the chat window haha! Literally was within 10secs!

Most queries have been answered within the hour though which I feel is acceptable for most things.

If we are talking about pro vs cons of Starling and Monzo then I’m afraid monzo really needs to sort out its help chat function. I’ve used chat function with Starling in the morning, evening and overnight and never waited more than 5 minutes for a reply. I used monzo chat for 1st time tonight and it’s 65 minutes and no one has even acknowledged my question. In app states a response under 20 minutes - come on? This doesn’t look good! My old fashioned bank replies within 5 minutes for chat.
Monzo big fail tonight - if too busy put a holding page out.

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It’s probably worth putting this in it’s own thread. You don’t want your Monzo complaint lost in a thread about Starling.

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It’s not a complaint as such just stating facts. I thought monzo was forward thinking and in touch with its customers. It’s like talking to a bank from 1990s!
Read loads on here over last week and really shocked and surprised that Monzo has failed so much. 70+ minutes for a reply I’d have been served quicker in a call queue at my old bank.

70+ mins for a reply sounds like something has gone wrong. It would be useful for Monzo to see that this has happened to work out what’s gone wrong.

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Having not really been particularly aware of banking in the 90s, this intrigued me. Were banks renowned for having long waiting times?

Banks in 80s were even worse. Open when you were at work and stuck in your office but shut for lunch when you had your lunchbreak

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I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had that experience. The average response time that you see in the app is automatically set by Intercom, not by Monzo so if it said 20 minutes, then unfortunately you waited an unusually long time. On the plus side, you weren’t on hold listening to annoying music, as you would have been if you had phoned your legacy bank’s customer service line :grimacing:

Monzo have grown to have much more users than Starling within a short space of time (gaining 100k users in about 3 1/2 months) & they have acknowledged that they’re struggling to keep up with the demand. So as the previous posts in this topic mention, they have also stepped up their efforts to hire new members of the support team, which should mean that the response times improve.

Also never open on Saturdays and used to close doors at 15:30 Monday to Friday so that they could do the books before finishing at 5pm. If you wanted a loan you’d have to make an appointment with the bank manager and turn up in your Sunday best, cap in hand!

Hi Drew, your post & the subsequent replies were focused on your experience using Monzo’s support, rather than how you were getting on with using Starling so I’ve moved the discussion to this topic, where another user has shared their similar experience & the Monzo team have responded. I hope that makes sense :slightly_smiling_face:

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I have also found that my support requests over the past few months have consistently been around an hour to first response.

If the COps team can’t cope with the userbase, perhaps Monzo should stop growing the userbase until they manage to fix the problem. Monzo is a fully regulated bank, not a SaaS startup. Just leaving it as “oh yeah we’re working on it” is a good way to get fined by the FCA.

Tom mentioned that he was proud of the <10 minute response time at one of the open offices (maybe January’s) before the surge in demand started so presumably Monzo are aiming for response times that’re that quick & clearly they’re not managing that sometimes at the moment.

But having said that, there have been relatively few complaints on social media & in this community about the response times, which I take as a sign that they’re still acceptable to Monzo’s users.

I’m sure they don’t need it but at least we know that they also have this incentive to not let them get out of hand! :slight_smile:

I can see a lot of frustration here with long wait times, but I still feel Monzo’s ability to deal with problems, and the time it takes them to do so, is utterly fantastic. I’ve never had to wait longer than 5 minutes for a response, luckily, but in my experience with other banks the online chat is more of a placeholder where it usually ends with ‘please contact this team and they’ll get back to you within 5 working days’. Perhaps my experience isn’t the norm, but I’ve had a fantastic experience with Monzo’s customer service.

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No music I suppose is a bonus but the intercom thing needs to be resolved then. It’s like your high street bank saying it opens at 9 to get there and it’s closed until 10:30. I appreciate customer growth has been massive (I’m one of those) and as always recruitment is behind but come on if Monzo is serious about doing things differently this very basic thing needs to be resolved.
I waited 70 minutes for a response which is totally unacceptable regardless of customer flow. If there is a large flow put a holding response - surely the tech guys can improve this? It’s mis leading customers - not something you want to do with FCA in mind.

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As you can see from Emma’s comment & the blog post, they agree :thumbsup:

The average response time figure is there for exactly this reason - to manage user’s expectations. As I mentioned, you waited an unusually long time for a response.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the slightly more advanced work that the technical team are doing to increase the speed of responses, Valerio’s talk from this event explains one example more detail -