I used to be very choosy about who on this forum I told to raise a complaint on here. But now I just tell anyone and everyone to, and then to raise it to the ombudsman when Monzo inevitably fail to respond, because unless there’s a load of regulated complaints I can’t think what might motivate anyone senior at Monzo to do anything about the state of customer care.
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Hey @Revels
Sorry to hear about what’s happened here, if you still need help I’m more than happy to try and answer your query via DMs. Definitely not the type of experience we want to someone to go through from what you’ve described. 
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An update if anyone cares. The person I spoke to on chat said they would raise a complaint for me, that was 18/12.
Got an email 3 days later (I’ve removed the persons name, this isn’t their fault, so don’t feel they should be full named online)
Okay, no big deal. It’s been Christmas and NY so wasn’t expecting a response yet. But I replied to that email today to see when I might expect an answer given it’s been 13 days (not working days I realise). Got an auto-response to start with and then this…
So my complaints team wait has been referred to the complaints team?!
Clearly a “normal” co-op has picked up my email, but it’s gone to the complaints@ email. Just messy! Someone trying to clear up/get a +1 on a task and not actually read the thread.
This isn’t an end of the world issue, I thought I knew what the problem was to start with and now I’m pretty confident I’m right, but if nobody ever complains about the service, it won’t get better. If the original person I spoke to hadn’t been so abrupt (and wrong ((and so un-Monzo like)) I probably would have just ignored it. But they chose to raise a complaint, all I wanted was to talk to someone with more knowledge!
I can only imagine how frustrating this is if it’s a bad situation for you with money/stress and you have no idea on the answer.
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Not from the email sender field, you didn’t.
Edit: ha, just saw it vanish
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Good spot. Fixed!
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18/12 - I contacted support and was given incorrect information from a very curt representative. I asked to speak to someone else, not to complain, but to get the help I required. This was not done and I was told I would have a complaint raised.
21/12 - Initial email from Monzo complaints team to say that there was a high demand and you’d be in touch as soon as possible.
3/1/ - I asked for an update
3/1 - I was told my request had been escalated to the complaints team, where it already was, and someone would reach out.
12/2 - I chased again. Nothing.
15/2 - They’ve remembered me! But this is so painful. They are not reading what I say/said, and still giving me completely wrong info. I think the latest person may have got to the bottom of it, but why wasn’t that info given two months ago?
I received the first message today at 15:06, I’ve replied pretty much instantly and I’ve spoken to 5 different people.
One guy wanted to know the details of my dispute. There is no dispute. Someone else apologised for the confusion.
This is really grating on me now. This isn’t a big issue, but if it was and this was the level of service I was getting. BOY. BYE.
I’m getting near instant responses but I’d rather they waited and read/understood before replying, clearly they can’t/don’t read up the thread either when someone else “takes over”
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Honestly I just don’t understand why Monzo can’t crack this. It has to be low resource, leading to a non existent training function. There’s just no consistency!
Now I’m sure that a lot of people won’t come in here to say how good it is, so we might not see the full picture, but it really needs sorting out.
I’d love there to at least be consistency. Ideally consistently good but I’d settle for average!
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Keep the cost of sale low before any IPO, I’m pretty sure is the strategy. They still overall rate highly on customer service metrics so there is little reason for the senior management to start spending a lot more cash on this.
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No idea what’s happening to my complaint now. They moved it to email and then back the app and acted like I’d just asked the question. Probably just close it and call it done!
I’d love someone senior to read the whole transcript and get their honest opinion on it. I don’t want money. I want Head of Co-ops to read it.
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Fair but this has consistently been a sticky area, it’s never been good. I would say I don’t know how they keep winning awards but most* people are probably voting for the brand not the service.
*In my opinion obviously.
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This, and from my previous experience with Barclays and NatWest, it’s also just a very low bar in the industry.
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I chose Monzo because of it’s customer service. It’s so awful these days - painful to interact with. Abysmal processes and systems. No escalation route. I sadly no longer recommend Monzo as it’s now the same as other banks.
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Genuinely interested if this stays the case, it seems as customer numbers shoot up for most banks they run into the same issues with customer services.
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Scaling is always the problem.
When you’re a small business, you can carefully select and hire the people who are passionate about the job and diligent about working towards the correct result.
When you’re huge, you can’t select to the same scale any more. Not only that, you can’t train to the same scale either. So not only do you have hires who aren’t necessarily the most passionate, and hires who haven’t necessarily received the best/made the most from their training, you get that awful combination of the two; ‘just a job’ hires who haven’t had the best training.
Put them in the field and their focus isn’t on doing the best job, it’s on hitting their metrics. Have to close X calls in a time period? They’ll hit that. They might not take the time to address the query properly, but they’ll hit their metric! (To take one example).
I suspect to an extent this might be part of what’s happening here. Because an agent has a metric to hit, they don’t have time to carefully read back through everything. So they’ll read what seems to them to be the most recent/relevant bit, fire off a response to that, and boom. They’ve hit their metric, they can move on.
Other possibility is the scripts supplied to COPs may be inadequate now, and not lead to an appropriate response. There may well be COps out there who’d like to dig deeper/investigate properly, but their hands are tied as they have to follow the script; and if the script says to respond with choice 1 when the customer says X, or 2 when the customer says Y, that’s what they have to do.
I count myself lucky that (a) my interactions with Monzo support so far have been really good, (b) when I’ve been forced through a self-service flow, I’ve actually been able to resolve my issue that way, and (c) I haven’t had to contact Monzo support for anything important or urgent in recent years.
Part of me does miss the days when support was smaller and the first response to my query might be “Hello, I’m X, head of [Relevant Department]…”, but I can understand why that can’t happen any more!
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NPS (net promoter score) is more commonly referred to when wanting opinions.
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Bad metrics is a possible issue (which is how I’d define this as an issue - if you can hit all your targets and still not do a good job of resolving the issues for the customer, then the metrics aren’t very good).
I doubt it’s the main issue, if I’m honest. From what I’ve seen I could hazard a guess the two main isssues are:
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Tooling. Something seems to be preventing customer care from seeing how an issue has been dealt with before, whether something is the same issue as a previous question. They don’t seem to organise by one issue = one ticket, which is the standard customer care approach. Instead it feels a bit like it’s one instance of customer contacting = one ticket, even if the customer is contacting to say ‘no that doesn’t answer my question’.
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Investment. Monzo are expanding which means they need to hire a lot and retain staff, to do that you either have to pay higher than industry salaries or deal with big recruitment gaps.
And honestly I think it’s very likely the latter. Everyone wants Monzo to be profitable and to make as much revenue per customer as possible, that’s the main strategy.
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Well in fairness to Monzo…
I submitted a question about the figures in the annual interest statement via chat at 13:20 today (Sunday). Question read and answered by a member of the savings team at 13:25. Comprehensive and comprehensible reply having read and understood the question.
I don’t know if they had a specialist on just because the tax year only just ended, or whether I’d have got that on any Sunday if the year.
But kudos - that’s how it should work and it was good to see it happen today.
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Poor experience recently with data on my statement feed. New agents checking in all the time and not reading previous messages. In a few cases the support person has changed and they pasted in the exact same response as the previous support person despite it being quite useless.
Quite surprised considering what happened. They accidentally rendered Apple payments as Aldi. All of them (£2k+ over 3 years!). I never shop at Aldi so reported the latest payment as fraud.
This then caused a lot of issues. The card was blocked. Then took many hours to unblock when the glitch had been fixed and Aldi magically became Apple again.
Over the weekend lots of issues with my apple products & services. All stopped! I tried to pay for more cloud space but it would not accept payment. Thought it was my address for my Monzo card. An issue I’ve had before. So deleted the monzo card and could not re-add it. Spent a long time trying to add it in different ways and devices.
Spoke to apple and they said the card will never be allowed to make purchases with them again due to the fraud alert on that card with a payment to them (That was actually miss labeled as Aldi hence the fraud report). My services were cancelled as the last payment was being refunded.
Monzo however won’t give me a free replacement card. They say it’s apple’s fault which of cause is very unlikely. Obviously something wrong with Monzos merchant APIs or similar and they won’t own up.
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Something so simple should not be causing this level of problems.
But also… we know to check the raw details. I’m sure a Monzo has more info than that available to them. Why are they not realising this is the issue?
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I couldn’t see the raw data and unfortunately it’s just out of view of my screenshots. I did download all transactions as CSV and it said Aldi everywhere but doesn’t include the raw data. But you’d think that Monzo would have checked the raw data and said something 
(sorry - is there a way to moved it?)