This I get all the time, exact words. Seems a polite way of saying I’m done with you now be gone with you. as there is nothing after all messages chasing/additional info you add are ignored totally.
They usually are employees of the company, most big firms have their own call centres.
A heavy Scottish accent can be very difficult too but it’s nonsense to try and pretend that there aren’t lots of people in foreign call centres without a very good grasp of English. Just because a small number of people in a country speak a language natively doesn’t mean they’re the ones being hired (they’re usually hired already by someone else).
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I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to call centre staff who don’t speak English. They may have a heavy accent but this doesn’t mean they don’t speak it.
Someone who didn’t have a grasp of English wouldn’t be working in an English call centre, I don’t know what company would hire these people and I think it’s your incorrect conceptions. Either that or you just don’t like speaking to them for whatever reason and choose not to understand.
I don’t know if you remember the Intercom days but nearly every chat was ended with:
10:22am
"
Is there anything else I can help you with?"
10:22am
“No thats all thanks”
10:23am
“
Cool, I’ll close this chat for now. Let me know if you need any further help”
Rate your chat experience
now its more like
10:22am Sep 25
So can you give me an update? Can I also ask about x?
2:01am Sep 27
Once again I’m sorry for the delay, we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.
08:00am Sep 28
Thanks. Can you answer x in the meantime?
15:00pm Oct 03
Hello? It’s been a few days can someone reply about x…
4:03am Oct 06
Sorry I don’t know but I’ve escalated the question about x. Once again I’m sorry for the delay, we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.
08:00am Oct 07
Oh for fucks sake.
@cookywook @simonb do Monzo realise the impact the growth has had on the customer experience, and how its changed from the almost instant response with polite ending to check everything is fine to this ignoring/escalating nonsense we have today. It can’t be good for business to keep ignoring the elephant in the room and hoping it gets better, it’s only going to get worse with more millions of customers without significant changes.
I’m only @ you two as you seem to run the entire forum. The lack of official forum staff and one-way traffic is another issue…
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Hate to disagree but I do.
I’ve had a couple good experiences, but mainly awful experiences with Three and Virgin Media and Indian call centre staff not understanding what it is I’m trying to convey to them. I know what needs to be resolved, but it takes far, far longer than it should.
Whether that’s down to being limited by scripts, fear of escalating a call or being unable to comprehend more complex sentences than the individual currently knows, I don’t know.
I suspect in a lot of cases it’s a mixture of all three.
It’s not that I don’t want to understand them - I hate calling any support number - I just want it over and done with as efficiently as possible. But having to repeat myself in multiple different ways to get someone to understand the actual issue instead of a non related issue they’ve assumed is the one I’m talking about, is frustrating.
In comparison, I had to call Nationwide for the first time the other day with a few queries. I asked some questions without having to really think about how I phrase my words, and they were great help. I don’t think I’ve ever come off the phone not just being satisfied, but having enjoyed speaking to a customer support representative, but there you go.
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The customer support issue is the main reason I’m not ready to full Monzo. I just have this nagging fear that if something goes tits up and I get my card cloned or whatever it would be a nightmare to sort out. Do they have a customer line for fraud enquiries?
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There’s only the number on the card. One number for everything.
I guess I won’t know until it happens (and hopefully it won’t). When I noticed several dodgy transactions on my HSBC account, it was all sorted in one quick phone call. I guess the risk is mitigated somewhat on Monzo in that generally speaking, because of the notifications, in theory at least, I’ll know straight away if something is wrong and can lock the card?
When you start a chat in app you get asked what it is in relation to. I believe fraud gets marked as urgent which (to my knowledge) has never had any complaints about response times 
I’m getting pulled into a lot of directions right now so I’ll get a long, thoughtful response to you as soon as I have the time (likely later in the evening) but the short version is, yes we are aware, we are putting a lot of work in to fix it - I don’t know all the details but I can share some of what I do know and give some context around some of the restructuring that’s happening.
One thing I can share first of all is that I believe we have recently increased the training time. For a period of time we wanted to try and get new COps on the frontline as soon as possible because we were simply drowning, the idea being that they should at least be able to handle simple queries pretty quickly and then pick up extra development in their first few weeks as much as possible. Over time we’ve seen that while this did work to a degree, it also brought about the new issue some of you have identified where you’re getting escalated pretty quickly (and in some cases, the issue shouldn’t have needed escalating) and then passed from pillar to post before getting an answer, which isn’t the service level we expect to provide. To tackle that I believe the training is now 2 or 3 weeks so when new COps do get on the frontline they have a wider knowledge base to begin with.
We’ve continued to aggressively hire, particularly in Vegas where we’re now up to 100 people.
More details to come when I get time!
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I think that’s generally what happens with Monzo, except it’s through chat. At the end of the day, if you’ve done nothing wrong, the bank is on the hook for fraudulent card transactions anyway.
I’ve been on this forum for some time, and I can’t recall anyone complaining about fraudulent card transactions not being refunded.
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To add to @simonb, we’re also looking at how we handle escalations and this should be changing very soon. I’m interested to see how it plays out.
Currently we escalate Chats for extra help/eyes/information and then a specialist or a COp with the particular knowledge would reply and hand the Chat back to the frontline COp.
In future it should be the person with the knowledge replying (if they’re frontline, complaints for example wouldn’t be as it would take away from them working on complaints 
)
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@simonb I’d love to read your fully thought out reply. I’ve been an ops manager of a phone network call centre so I know the answer isn’t always throw more bodies, but things must be getting manic now. I hope for all.customers that things start to move.
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Exactly this
Actually I had a recent experience with Microsoft and their support centre which is based in India.
I knew from the first 10 seconds that he didn’t understand what I was saying or even basic computing. He stuck to his script which was pointless.
In the end I just hung up it, wasnt worth my time I had a rough idea of the answer and just hoped someone at MS could clarify.
It might have changed since I last had to call or live chat with them, but I’ve had some really good interactions with MS - they’ve been pretty good with warranties and what-not.
I may have just gotten lucky and spoken to the american side?
I even once spoke with Jesus at Microsoft, apparently. He was pretty good too. Still got the screenshot somewhere.
It was windows 10 activation, I can’t remember what exactly what I needed but it was about a digital key for windows 10 and clarification about new hardware install.
But he was trying to take me through a hard ware script and asking me if the computer was working and he just couldn’t comprehend the question and stayed on script 
Hey all,
So in addition to the extra training time, more hiring, and improved escalation process that Beth has mentioned, we’re also working on re-adjusting the schedules and balancing the amount of time that specialists have on their particular domains. One of the reasons for this is that it’s been proven to us that context switching can be incredibly difficult and slow down productivity in both directions.
Some extra context on the new escalation process that Beth mentioned, part of it means keeping much more activity directly within the chat hub and queues that we work from. As it stands, a lot of escalations send links to Slack channels, and that means that both the COp doing the escalating and the person responding to the escalation have to spend additional time switching between Slack and the chat hub. The effect of this is that it greatly contributes to Slack overload for COps and means they must pay attention to many more channels than the should, which quickly leads to mental overload and confusion about where to find correct info. With the new system, we should be able to reduce the amount of required Slack channels for COps by as much as 20 channels!
We’ve massively refined our QA process, which means learning from outcomes that could have been improved should flow much more smoothly moving forward. We have been working on improvements to Monzo Helper and we’ve already started to see some early results from this that are pleasing.
One thing that was really helpful back in the day and kind of got lost in our move from Intercom to our own purpose-built tooling was searching by tag. There have been some very early proposals made around using machine learning to use keywords to pull up similar conversations that have been resolved so that a COp might have some quick access to real previous similar instances to see how they were resolved. This is effectively already possible but it’s a fairly manual process and so doesn’t get used much.
There was a comment above about having too many agents dealing with one issue. Part of the new escalation process will help with this as well, by getting the conversation quickly back to the original COp in a timely manner with the correct information for them to proceed (if appropriate) or for the specialist to “own” the conversation and resolve it themselves, if that’s the appropriate course. What we’ve found to date is that wasn’t clear when a conversation should go back to the original COp after receiving the specialist advice and when it should not. So by addressing the various kinds of escalations we see and breaking them down into defined categories we can make a more robust process there.
Sorry for the huge brain dump, but that’s just some of the stuff that I’m personally aware of - there may well be (and likely is) a lot of other stuff being worked on too, but the TLDR is yes, we are working very hard to bring wait times down, and to build out processes that scale even as we double, triple, quadruple in customer numbers and we greatly appreciate your patience as we get there 
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That all sounds really good. Especially:
This is kind of relevant to my day job; I get a lot of queries escalated to me - sometimes because a customer has just put “Dear [my name]” at the start of their query 
And most of the time, I bat them straight back with some form of ‘you have access to all the information needed and don’t need me to answer this’.
I find it’s often a lack of confidence/training thing, and unfortunately in my case I don’t have the power to address that. It’s great to hear that for Monzo, though, this has now been identified as an area of improvement and will be addressed. (The excessive Slack channels part sounds terrifying; I thought drowning in emails was bad enough.)
Fingers crossed that third time’s the charm, as it were, and the in-app chat properly gets back on track. I think the thing we customers perhaps forget sometimes is that as a company you’ve had incredible growth, and with incredible growth often comes growing pains (and we also perhaps forget that what may seem obvious in hindsight couldn’t have been predicted at the time; to pluck imaginary figures, you could predict 1% growth, plan for 10%, and get 100%. Hindsight will say you should’ve planned for 100%, forgetting that at the time this wouldn’t have looked reasonable).
I wonder if there is one area that could be improved which you haven’t touched on, and that’s prioritisation. A way of jumping people up the queue if there’s a problem with, say, fraud on their account, or a lost card abroad. I haven’t had cause to use the chat myself for a while, but it sounds like the chance to flag something as “urgent” has been removed - and in any case, that was a blunt instrument that could’ve caused false reports. Or are there parts of Monzo still working on machine learning around this sort of thing?
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Yep - I’m not personally aware of any work happening in this area but that’s not to say it isn’t happening. Definitely agree that it should be looked into and it most likely already is. If I find any more information on that I’ll be sure to update 
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