Chat and call times are changing

What bank provides you with bad customer service? Only my opinion but any time I’ve had to interact with a bank they’re generally available immediately and treat me very well…

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Have to agree - typically I haven’t experienced bad customer service from a bank; what I didn’t like were the excessive fees, which are slapped on anything and everything. When I was in debt after university, that cycle of ‘not quite having enough money, DD refused, getting a fee slapped on, not having enough money, not sure why because mini statement didn’t tell me what was pending’ was super frustrating.

That said, back then all my banking was done in branch; I’ve never tried to call a bank because I’ve always been concerned about wait times.

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After receiving completely wrong information by two different COPs at the weekend before being passed to a “specialist” who instantly answered my question correctly before passing me straight on to the complaints department because of the previous COPs, my question is: if you’re already in a chat with Monzo and realise you have a reply you hadn’t seen, can you reply to it in the “urgent” hoirs at nights?

I ask this because I didn’t realise the complaints team messaged me today until just now, I wanted to and have replied to it now at 10:45pm because I’ve just read it and it’s fresh in my head, however, should I have waited until the morning?

I know it seems like a funny question, just wandering what I’m supposed to do there?

I’d love to know how these messages are triaged in these times?

I also found it interesting that the complaints team used the words “as this is not a live chat, our responses won’t be immediate”. I’ve never seen that in chat before!

My take on this is that you / we should just message whenever is convenient for us. If Monzo chooses not to reply outside of certain hours, that’s really on them. And if they don’t want us to message between certain hours, they can turn off the ability to do that. (I’d really rather they didn’t though. I’d probably go elsewhere if they got too strict about it).

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I’ve now seen multiple threads on the forum of customers asking how they can contact Monzo. It seems Monzo have changed where you can find the contact/chat button in the app for some or maybe all of their customers.

Just seems silly to me, it’s like Monzo are purposely building in friction into the system to try and reduce customer contact numbers.

That’s crazy, that is exactly what attracted me to Monzo years ago. They were rallying against crappy organisations that purposefully made it difficult for their customers to get help.

For me this is symbolic, it’s represents a change in how I think of Monzo. I think it’s feable and cowardice to purposefully make it difficult for customers to be able to contact customer services.

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Don’t be so dramatic!

Encouraging users to self help, means that when you do need help, the queue is shorter.

People can still contact customer services and I’m sure many people are finding it themselves. But I bet there’s a link between people who can’t find chat and ask stupid questions because they don’t look for the answer themselves.

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I would treat it like email. Just because you send it out of hours, doesn’t mean they have to answer it. If you were emailing a company about an issue and you only saw the email late at night, you wouldn’t wait until morning to reply, you’d reply now and just expect the reply the next day.

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I know what you mean. Obviously me and you wouldn’t struggle to find it in the app still. And yes I imagine we don’t ask them stupid questions either because we are able to find out the answers ourselves.

But it’s not up to us to just write of other people because they ask stupid questions or struggle to figure out how they could contact customer service.

Monzo wants to become a huge bank with millions of customers, then unfortunately they are going to have to deal with silly customers. And hindering their ability to ask for help is only going to push these customers away

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I would love to have the data to see where people are going before and after this.

I expect a lot of people go straight to chat and they spend a lot of time pointing people towards the FAQs etc. People should be finding them themselves but they clearly aren’t and now they aren’t finding the chat first either.

Maybe there needs to be a very obvious chat option that is just a chat bot? You say “how do I close a pot?” and it directs you to an FAQ. You say “Nike charged me twice” and it tells you how long the wait is to talk to a person.

But there’s definitely been an increase in people who can’t find the chat, it’s not the toughest thing to find but maybe it’s a little too hidden now.

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This is how it works currently (for me at least):


EDIT: the options given aren’t shown here, only the option I selected, like “something else” etc.

I also raised a ticket and haven’t had a reply for 7 hours but didn’t get the message about wait time (Haven’t had a reply)

So I am curious whether this is more A\B testing

Your wait times are not an A/B test.

These times are exactly what we are tackling with other projects to help the majority of questions to be self-solved and free up human support for those questions that do need it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I think the question was is it an A/B test that wait times were NOT given. Notwhether the wait time itself was a test.

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Yes sorry, wasn’t clear enough, the above is correct. I was asking why I wasn’t given a wait time at all.

Also, I have had a reply saying they don’t know android and that they will pass me to a non-ios colleague, but this will take 8 hours? Surely they can see which version of the app I am on and ideally know both OS

As long as Monzo is still there 24/7 for dire emergencies then I have no issue with the chat and call times changing. In fact, I truly believe it could be good for the long-term future of the bank.

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I apologise, this is also not an A/B test.

It’s okay! You will only see a time estimate if we have one that we can be even slightly confident about. There are times and queues where the wait time is either too variable or we just can’t calculate an estimated response time for whatever reason.

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Just thought I’d add that I’ve had to contact NatWest a few times over the last few days (it was not urgent, however), and each time I used their 24 hour Webchat service. One time this was at 8am, one time at 10pm, and a couple of times at around 1am. On every occasion, I was connected with an agent in under 5 seconds. The COps were super friendly and helpful, and replied to each chat message in a matter of seconds, and had access to all of the same account controls as a telephone banking COp would have (i.e. the same type of thing as Monzo chat).

I have to say, I was absolutely blown away. And it baffles me that one of my legacy banks absolutely blows Monzo’s customer support offering out of the water. Monzo was meant to show us how a bank should be run, putting the customer at the centre of everything. Now it seems, in an increasing number of aspects, it’s the other way round!

Edit: I should also mention that the other day I wanted to log some feedback with HSBC regarding their app. I opened Webchat and, like with NatWest, was connected with an agent in a few seconds. We had an actual live conversation (unlike some other ‘live chat’ services that take ages to get a response to each message) about my suggestions for potential improvements for the mobile banking app. It was fantastic - hard to believe I was talking to a high street bank and not a challenger!

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I’ve also had some great dealings with HSBC. As someone who works night shifts, I have to sleep during the day, and after 12 hours coming home at 7:00am my bank is not my main thought, rather getting into bed ready for the next 12 hour shift that evening. I live chatted with HSBC during the early morning and waited less than 5 mins.

I’m not overly bothered by this, however I would seriously stop calling it live chat as for the most part it isn’t.

I also don’t think the answer to reducing silly questions is to make it harder for everyone to access chat because ultimately that also makes it more difficult for the non-silly questions. The answer is to make it easier to find the answers and/or realise you’re getting a ton of silly questions about one thing and rectify that issue individually.

In my line of work, this is really common. Some calls are utterly life or death emergencies, some are not and some aren’t even vaguely relevant calls. Two numbers are introduced to try and streamline, with urgent calls taking precedent.

This is kind of where Monzo were, asking if it’s urgent.

I also just have to accept though, that with so many people to service, inevitably some will still call and waste time. It’s a part of being a large organisation. It’s always going to be the case.

We don’t restrict those from calling, nor do we hide or make it less easy to call. Just take some on the chin, and try to generally educate people on when and what they can call for.

Monzo, I believe personally, should be going down this road. Other banks are absolutely catching up or running a mile ahead of them right now in terms of managing customer calls/issues/complaints and that personally makes me sad as someone who has shoved Monzo down everyone’s throat since the Mondo days!

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I absolutely agree. HSBC gets a lot of stick for customer service, but they’ve always been good to me and my family, genuinely helping out when needed - I think there’s something to be said for being able to sit down with a bank manager and arrange a personalised banking package to help you out. That’s something that the challenger banks simply can’t do - the way they operate is of course, by their very nature, far more black and white and automated. Even little things like offering me a drink when I visit a branch fosters loyalty - while what Monzo is doing is fairly successfully achieving the polar opposite. This is what makes me wonder how mass market Monzo can and will become.

However, one gripe with HSBC and NatWest’s live chat is the Anglo-Indian language barrier - it has been a bit of an issue in the past, but the COps have always been very friendly even if we can’t always understand each other :joy:

And I completely agree with you about how Monzo should be approaching this. If there is such a large volume of pointless chat messages (e.g. something that can be easily solved/found out by looking in the FAQs) then surely customer services can dismiss these very quickly by simply linking to the article and closing the chat. Both NatWest and HSBC use a chatbot which provides links to related help articles, but crucially you can always get through to a person if you want to (you just type ‘Speak to an agent’ and it bypasses it). Monzo should be, I think, using their tech capabilities to create a smarter help article suggestion feature, while retaining a way to contact a person if you want. That way, they would be reducing their customer support workload by helping customers faster, rather than hiding from them.

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Is there a reason for the call queue system cutting people off after the wait time?

Many users seem to have found that somewhat annoying from their posts on the forum.

It must be very frustrating to keep going to the back of the queue if you’re calling for something urgent.