Please accept my apologies on behalf of the company on how long the wait time was for you on this occasion. We can and will do better, however please bear in mind when making comparisons between us and other companies, that their customer base is different to ours. Starling, in particular, have only been sending out cards for a couple of months, so whilst I don’t know their figures, they are unlikely to be looking at more than 10,000 customers right now, whereas we are at 250,000. That’s not a dig at them - I think they are a great company and I have a card myself. Just something to bear in mind. Also worth bearing in mind that 24/7 support is something that other challenger companies actually charge for as part of their premium service!
We’ve made huge strides recently and generally speaking, our response times are world class during the day. We’ve recently been able to hire more overnight staff, so our response times are generally pretty good overnight too. The final frontier for us is weekend, and we definitely haven’t got to where we want to be on weekends yet. Specific weekend support isn’t easy to hire for, but we’re getting there and I truly believe that our weekend wait times will soon be on par with everywhere else - certainly by the time we exit Beta.
Once again, please accept my apologies and rest assured that as a company we are working as hard as we can to improve this situation.
To back @simonb up on this, since this thread was created, I now work for Monzo and have joined the overnight support team, as have many others on the daytime team. This weekend I have put in two overtime shifts on top of my regular working hours to try and bring these queues down by getting common and short issues out of the way of the more experienced members of the team.
The recent account verification requirements change has put a lot more work on the COps team recently, though it would have been much worse if our amazing security and app teams hadn’t worked so hard on fixing the common issues. We’ve got a few more fixes for verification on some Android devices coming.
While we fully admit that the queues have been much longer than we’ve liked at peak times, this is something we are actively working on and discussing across the company. Both in increasing our numbers in COps and decreasing the need to contact us with work in core, security, and the apps themselves.
I definitely feel the stress placed on the team given the slightly longer waiting times (still nothing too major) so I now post on the forum if it’s just a basic question/ something that isn’t really urgent. I think a lot of people here know nearly just as much as the team (and reply really quick!) so I think it’s a definite plus that we can get help from more than one source. I’m not sure about other people but talking on the phone stresses me out esp when I’m dealing with banks/ embassies/ other official stuff. and I am more comfortable communicating through in-app chat. You can’t exactly send a screenshot of the problem over the phone.
P.s. nice to put a face behind the name now! ️ I kept assuming your avatar was Hinata from Haikyuu!!
@simonb@RichardR - thank you both for your replies. I appreciate the customer growth of which I am one. I am a shift worker and thus understand that there are less staff around at night. I suppose for me the biggest frustration was as above - the app said 20 minutes but it took 70 minutes before a response from yourselves. If it had said 60 minutes waiting like it did last night when I checked then I wouldn’t have been bothered.
The nature of my query was that I had to use chat and couldn’t obtain the answer on the forum.
I’m wondering if it’s not so much a strict queue (waiting in line) before your issue is dealt with, but a priority queue depending on the urgency of the issue?
From my own experience, something as trivial as requesting a golden ticket to pass on can take a while for it to be acknowledged whereas reporting that a user has had their card and phone stolen gets a very quick response.
Perhaps these in-app chat requests go into a bucket to get prioritised by the duty COps?
