Hi everyone long time no see, not posted for a while, things sure are different around here nowdays.
Noticed a bit of a trend:
In the last two weeks there have been at least 8 posts where a users says they can’t find chat. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
And that’s just if you search for “chat”, there’s probably more using different language.
I don’t know what percentage of users would come to this forum for help when stuck but I imagine it’s pretty small. I understand wanting to protect COPs but it feels to me like the current help system isn’t working. I appreciate that you don’t see all the times the help system works for people and solves their problem but repeatedly seeing the phrase “I can’t find chat” can’t be good.
Sadly Monzo have been clear so far [ (1)(2) ] that this is an intended move to a more self-help driven model.
As much as I would agree with the need for this, I have a feeling it’s not going to be coming back.
I’m hoping that in time the Self Help sections will have a significant overhaul, to be more intuitive and genuinely self service, but I think that’s the feautre we need to rally behind.
Until then I guess all we can do it’s make clear the ways to get to chat when needed.
Edit:
Which are: Search for “Contact Us”; Look at any transaction and press “Something Wrong” (though this may be changing); and I think you can also set up a deeplink shortcut to put you straight into chat.
Wow that’s really disappointing, I guess things are even more different around here than I realised.
I bet a good percentage of chat queries are a waste of time and the help articles could have solved the problem but if people want chat that means there’s a problem with the help articles not that you should hide what used to be a unique selling point.
I think it’s the balance of people using the chat because they can’t be bothered to look (whether they admit that or not) vs people that genuinely need the chat. And I think it’s tipped a tiny bit too far.
There must be a correlation between people who can’t find the chat and then make threads on here, I bet most of their issues could be solved by linking to something but there will be people in need who can’t find it.
surely the number of people that start threads on here about finding chat is symptomatic of the problem … why bother searching the forum using the frying pan when I can just ask the question in my own thread and get somebody else to find the answer for me
I find it quite ridiculous that Monzo have made it quicker and easier to find the forum, register on the forum and create a thread rather than find a way to access chat.
That is what seems crazy to me. By all means add friction so people can’t ask yiu what you had for dinner last night, but the fact that people are doing what they’re doing because they can’t find chat is in my opinion quite ridiculous.
It takes 2 seconds to find chat if you know what to search. A lot longer to register for the forum. Monzo need to take a second look at this and try harder.
Is the balance off right now? Perhaps, and there is more work to do, but it isn’t something I work on directly so I can’t really say much here (my work is just Card Payment Disputes).
I will say this, in-app access to high quality support chat with humans for 100% of questions is simply unsustainable at scale given Monzo’s wide appeal and a service that almost everyone gets for free.
Support wait times have been unacceptably long at many points in Monzo’s life and most questions are, in reality, answered by a single saved response. We promised everyone that we would fix the frustratingly long wait times but at the same time, hiring and training high quality support staff is expensive so we have to find ways to balance all of the requirements.
Overall, we want you to be able to solve all common issues yourself in the app at any time of any day from anywhere on earth, then provide that high quality human support for situations where for whatever reason, you cannot do that. That is something that can scale very well into the future of Monzo in our mission of making money work for everyone.
The number of people who came to the forum was unexpected, it’s like putting pipework together and finding there’s a leak somewhere. We’ll figure out what causes it and hopefully fix the major cases where people are finding dead ends or otherwise giving up.
Appreciate the response as its not even your department
I’d say a lot of the cause is quite clear from all the discussions on here, everybody seems to have different flows and ways of accessing, what might have started out as as A/B test has now become something where people are unable to help each other without giving 3 different pieces of advice based off which flow they get.
A lot of people seem to get a question at the end of each article asking f it solved their problem and if they say no they get taken to chat. I dont have this but to me seems a logical approach, however, it needs to be on every article not just a few.
I get a question that says was this helpful, but that seems to me to just collect feedback on each article for Monzo’s use rather than help the customer.
It’s definitely a tricky one, it’s understandable to push people through self help but there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel when going through articles that just don’t solve the problem, and currently for a lot of users on one of the testing routes, that light just is not there.
Experiments are temporary, as are staged rollouts. You will see these consolidate back down to one set of flows over time based on what worked in the experiment.
Ideally, the forum should not be a place for support at all. The fact that it is that right now is a related but separate problem.
Not everyone has those options. That is the entire problem. Some people have no option to contact support, I suspect it is those people joining the forum. And many of them will just not bother, especially if Monzo is just a disposable spending account for them (which to be honest probably suits Monzo, if their account does not and will never generate profit).
