I think i’m on the worst test track so I’ll answer your points with what I get
I can search the help articles but almost none of them have any links to chat if they do not answer the question.
This really does not work. I just searched: “chat”, “live chat” and “I want live chat”. Not a single one would give me a way to get to chat except a suggested article on Domestic Abuse but I didn’t want to click the link in that article in cae it triggered a process I don’t want to intrude on.
These do not exist, each article has: “Was this helpful?” with yes or no, but these don’t do anything, presumably just fire the answer back to monzo for feedback on the article.
This button does not exist anymore, it use to but not anymore.
All fo the above makes this a lot more reasonable why people come here.
Edit: I’m not trying to tear into Monzo, I love them and they have been a big part in turning my financial life around, but this current help situation is terrible.
Haha, it’s understandable though when all the user experiences vary so much.
I literally just came across something i find very amusing though, I always know I can access chat by searching “Contacting Monzo” If I search that It gives me a help article with the title of “Contacting Support” That article has 2 links to chat, the telephone number and the email address. What is funny is I just searched for the name of the article “Contacting Support” and I get 0 results that have anything to do with it. That article is gone and I can’t access support form any of the “suggested” links.
I guess i’ll search the terms i know work but that just seems silly.
To be fair though, part of Monzo’s own advertising was “you can chat to us at any time of day or night” - it seems like even when that advertising was put out, Monzo knew this was a problem, and would only get worse as user numbers increased. If it’s not sustainable at scale it shouldn’t form part of a campaign to drive more users to the app.
For me the only road that would lead there was to search specifically “Contact Us”. Though I just checked and it seems I’m now back on the track that has Chat available on every help page.
My take on the problem is that the first thing to solve would have been a vast improvement in the way the Help articles work before removing the button. I’m sure there are plenty of cases where people aren’t searching well enough, but there’s plenty of occaisons when it won’t recognise synonyms for common banking phrases, or a few broad ways of describing problems. If this is made better, plus some more context awareness, I think that would cut out plenty of chat requests.
What’s not clear is whether we’re on the right version or not. What the final version is, are we on another A/B test, is it OS parity, or how far through the roll out they are
Getting a straight answer would help us to help people who come on here. Which will ultimately help Monzo with this problem..
This, and all those threads related to the chat function, are just so exasperating. Why has no one properly appraised the level of frustration being aired?
Fine that @Rika is valiantly pitching in, but this needs proper attention.
I think you are referencing the advertisement I have a print of. I get where you’re coming from here, but we’re not getting rid of in-app chat. The intent is that we get people to try and solve their problem using tools (like self-serve disputes) we are continuing to work on before going straight to frontline support.
Even just by asking people to try to search for their issue before a chat button appears means that when someone does send in a message, our system can have an idea of what group of support staff can help with that topic (see the community meme of being escalated endlessly to specialists for why this is good!). If you type a question about a transaction dispute and you could not find the answer in the app, you should be put straight through to the transaction disputes queue and be given a time estimate that is accurate for your query, rather than wait in the frontline support queue, then be moved over to the disputes queue for a further wait.
In short, even when you do have to chat in, we should be able to get you to the right team quickly.
I have my opinions on the current state of this, and you are absolutely welcome to your opinion on the specifics. It is absolutely not perfect yet, and there are still some clear problems, but the overall vision is “you can solve common problems yourself in-app first, then go to chat for either urgent issues or where the in-app help does not solve things”.
The key thing here is that if we do nothing, the wait times for in-app chat will just keep going up for everybody.
I’m not going to defend the specifics, and I don’t believe we have perfectly hit the mark yet, but there is a need to try these things out. Some of these consequences are not as obvious as you might think until you’ve actually tried it and seen how people respond.
I’m hoping that eventually there’ll be a “chat to us” button at the bottom of every help article for all users. So if the help article doesn’t help, chat support is immediately accessible.
But even then I think it will also need to be clearer that running a search is the avenue to eventually getting to chat. Even though the search box currently says “ask a question” I think many don’t see it as a route to chat.
Without the clear carrot of eventual access to chat they end up thinking ‘stuff that I can’t be bothered to give this search thing a try’ and go straight to the community or Twitter in frustration.
I can’t help but feel like this whole thing could have just been avoided if a little more thought went into the implementation in the first place. I talked at length about this in a different thread but I’m gonna give a shortened version here.
The tl;dr would be everything else would be a hell of a lot easier with more communication.
The issue is no one knew what happened and suddenly people who had real issues who needed to contact support couldn’t and that’s dangerous. Moreover, it’s not the monzo way to do things. This whole bank is about transparency and communication. Moving the button with nothing to tell people it’s been moved, not removed, has all the same effects as just removing it. By removing a core service (accessing customer support is a core service) without a single piece of communication, from a company that prides itself on communication, people have less trust now.
And this whole thing could have been avoided easily with a full screen flow pop up the first time someone opens the help tab after the roll out. All it needs to say is chat has moved, to search their query first, and if their query still isn’t answered then they can speak to someone then. That’s it! That’s all it would take! And no one thought to do that? Did someone stop them?
In case it needs saying, I don’t expect monzo to use live chat for everything and I fully support using self help but the implementation here was poor, and not what I expect from monzo
Something like that would be good but I imagine the results of the test need to be seen first and then they (monzo) can decide if that’s the appropriate route.
I’ve no issue with different layouts or work flows being tested and I also understand the benefits of not announcing that there’s a test happening as I’m sure that may skew results.
However, I do think improvements to the self help side of things should have been done before adding the friction test.
To be honest, I don’t think that a free text search is the right tool for self help, especially when the search algorithm frequently returns unrelated articles. Perhaps a set of preliminary questions on the help screen to filter down to the articles that may actually be helpful, with chat available after that if the articles didn’t help.
It’s not exactly a groundbreaking idea, but I think it’s a more effective approach than asking a customer to just search for their problem. Particularly when they may well get completely unrelated results if they don’t use the right terminology.
Daft though this observation may be, just how many issues or topics relating to account or app use are there?
Another daft one… with a community of this size and with this level of commitment, why not turn the enthusiasm to mutual advantage?
Distill the queries raised on this forum - group them - see what’s missing - then test them out on the community or a sub-group. Put the forum to work.
1 Like
Anarchist
(Press ‘Help’ search ‘Contact us’ or email help@monzo.com or call 0800 802 1281)
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I stopped doing unpaid work a long time ago. I’m sure there will be plenty of takers, though.
I appreciate you taking the time for a thought through response - and don’t get me wrong, I agree entirely with the vision here - teach a man to fish, sort of thing. Focus the time on “Support Design” (i.e. making it work to that vision) rather than “Doing Support”, and things will become more effecient overall. On board.
Just on this bit though:
This has not been the experience (some) users, including myself have had with this change - for many, not finding an answer leads you to a dead end in the help section, with the only way ‘out’ being searching for a specific article to get to chat (which judging by the number of posts, is not super obvious). And it seems that aspect is not ‘context aware’.
It’s this dead end with no clear way out that is the subject of frustration, I think. Not sure if different users are on different stages of roll-out, but certainly the “worst route” looks like that.
That leads to at best, users having problems that just go unresolved (Have you ever had a “online chat support” as “what would you do if Chat wasn’t available today” with “I would have left my issue unresolved”), or at worst, leaves people with urgent problems struggling to get in touch.
High quality, 24/7 support has been one of the key selling points of Monzo. It seems like in their pursuit of “growth” and “engagement” Monzo intentionally misled users into signing up based on a feature they knew is unsustainable and would have to be cut back.
How much do you think people should pay for their account to support this, when people ask them stupid questions, or don’t even bother looking how to do things themselves first?
Starling seems to be offering chat just fine for free along with a bunch of features Monzo also used to have but had to cut back due to cost issues (foreign ATM withdrawals, etc).
When it comes to stupid questions it seems like the self-help part of the app needs to be improved and a lot of routine operations (disputes, etc) should be made self-service (there is work happening in this area but in my opinion this should’ve been done long ago and definitely before hiding the chat button).
