Customer Support Growing Pains

(Mark Woosey) #1

I’ve often felt the customer support at Monzo has been one of its killer features, against both challenger and incumbent banks. I’ve had people ask me why Monzo is so worthwhile and it’s usually amongst the top three aspects I’ll mention as being in Monzo’s favour.

However I’ve noticed that in the past 10 weeks or so, the experience hasn’t quite been up to the high standards I’ve usually experienced and commended. Problems get solved and overall the experience is fine, but I feel the quality of support hasn’t quite matched Monzo’s own benchmark (although overall service has still been reasonable).

I’ve had a couple of issues of varying severity and urgency where simple queries have taken a disproportionate amount of time to resolve, and in both instances I’ve had to restart queries or submit new queries having been left in a state of limbo without things being resolved. I also had a case on Friday where I was switched between 3 support ops in the first half of the day, which I’ve never experienced before - I’ve only once been passed between staff and I think that was a tech escalation, this didn’t seem to be the case this time.

Has anyone else noticed a level of support that’s felt a degradation over the norm? Am I just finding myself in isolated incidents? Or is this a sign of Monzo struggling to scale its customer support operations as it’s breached 750k current accounts?

(Tony, Secret Lemonade Drinker) #2

I’ve noticed no significant degradation in the quality of any customer support from Monzo. If anything, it’s improved, for me at least. Admittedly I’m not constantly asking questions, just a couple of enquiries over the past year, but then again IMO it would be fairly out of the ordinary to have more than one or two opportunities to contact CS.

Sorry, I know that doesn’t help, but just thought I’d add my two-penneth.

#3

I always thought it odd the lack of Customer Support roles being advertised for a “bank” but then that may just be they feel they have enough staff

(Mark Woosey) #4

I wouldn’t say I’ve had an excessive number of enquiries in those 10 weeks. I’ve:

  • Submitted a PAYE enrichment request
  • Had an issue with a Monzo-to-Monzo payment’s feed item (2 separate cases for same incident, first to query it hadn’t failed, second to chase the fix for the feed item a week after I’d been told it would be fixed)
  • Apple Pay activation (x2)
  • Bug report
  • Failed debit payment (the aforementioned case where I had three separate staff handle the issue, which didn’t really result in a particularly in depth or worthwhile response relative to the length and number of staff involved).

It does help to know you’ve not experienced similar issues, it’s reassuring.

(Rika Raybould) #5

This certainly isn’t an answer but there’s a couple of things at play here.

Not only are we dealing with significantly more queries than when I joined a year ago, we’re also dealing with a far wider variety and more difficult queries.

This year, we committed to rapidly scaling our support team to resolve the long wait times many people experienced towards the end of the last year and to ease some of the pressure on the existing team (I certainly went through hell over the new year before I moved into engineering!).

It’s certainly fair to say there have indeed been some growing pains bringing in a large number of new staff while also launching new features but it’s something we’ve been actively improving over the last quarter.

[Android/iOS] Showing option to activate replacement card... although I haven't ordered one
(Mark Woosey) #6

Sorry the title ended up as unintentional clickbait. It possibly sounded more critical than intended (I just couldn’t think of anything more suitable!)

I think growing pains is a fair way of framing things. As I edited to say, I wouldn’t say the quality overall is anything less than good, it’s just not felt quite as great. Hopefully this thread won’t go much further showing my experiences will have been isolated, it’s just I noticed there was a clear period for the slight slump.

The first quarter of the year I was impressed by the quality of current account support, particularly when I expect there was strain in supporting two different products (prepaid). Hopefully these pains will soon pass and everything will settle nicely :slight_smile:

(#savetheseabass) #7

I’d imagine last Friday was particularly busy with the new joint account holders and the couple of payment issues from Thursday

(Mark Woosey) #8

I’ve updated the title to be less negative and hopefully foster broader discussion, good and bad.

#9

I would imagine this is a difficult thing to juggle having rapid growth in features coupled with Customer Support on those features.

When new features are released at Monzo are all the support staff briefed on the available support before the release or is it done during or shortly after the rollout?

(Rika Raybould) #10

Yes, in the ideal case, all support staff are briefed on potential problems and have documentation before any new feature is released.

Of course, we can’t always predict what the questions will be so there tends to be updates fairly soon after launch based on what we learned from that launch. Training is an ongoing thing here!

In some cases such as the joint account preview, we don’t brief all support staff at the preview stage (you’ll instead receive support either from a smaller squad or directly from the team working on that feature) but certainly would before a wider public launch.

#11

Here’s a question, just to see, did any of you ever contact your legacy bank as much as you have done with Monzo? Would you expect the call the be answered without a long time on hold, and often told you can read a guide on the portal, or given a blunt reply to the similar response to, that’s the way it is.

I think Monzo has actually outdone all expectations considering the original beta only started 815 days ago (March 2016) . We now are seeing people test joint accounts, features ahead of every other bank and a community growing at the same pace.

Not dismissing anyone’s frustrations with slower than we’ve grow to expect responses, or frustrations that things don’t always go fully to plan, but I’m here for the long run hopefully, and have come to reside that we’re going to get some bumps along the way! I’m 100% certain Monzo will read your posts, and actively take them on-board as they plan ahead.

(Tony, Secret Lemonade Drinker) #12

I just don’t bother at all with my legacy bank (NatWest – I’ve not gone full monzo … yet). Once I had an issue and I tried for help in branch and after much nonsense in a rapidly-dwindling lunch break I was directed to call their customer support line! Even then, I didn’t get the answer I was after!

Questions via Twitter are always answered with “send us a DM”, they never give a public answer to a question. You know, something that might help the NEXT person!

Compared to them, Monzo is light years ahead in terms of support. A breath of fresh air. Just the fact this community exists at all, never mind that they have actual staff replying (frequently in their own time), boggles my mind.

#13

No more no less. Surely if someone has an issue it’s an issue?

Yes

Nope

(Adam Williams) #14

I suspect you’re in the minority, @zombi - I’ve been left on hold for substantial periods of time with multiple legacy banks… The poor CS is one of the reasons I switched to Monzo.

With that said, the only handling of a support query I was unhappy with was regarding a SWR TVM that crashed when I tried to pay via chip & pin. I wanted the presentment removed but the staff member who handled it wouldn’t do so without proof and I was forced to wait the week for it to naturally drop off. I felt that, given the issue with these TVMs was well documented, some discretion here would’ve gone a long way.

Other than that, I’ve not noticed anything too problematic in 2018 with my own support queries.

#15

Don’t you know your not allowed to suspect anything. Facts and sources required :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

(Graham - Mental health professional) #16

Couple of very similar threads developed here methinks…

(Adam Williams) #17

I’d be very interested to see some stats on this, actually! I suspect most banks don’t publish them though :stuck_out_tongue:

#18

Agreed. That would be very useful to contrast and compare the support of the various banks.

(Marcel Ruhf) #19

Yep - let’s hope that one gets sorted on Monday (looks like a CS agent not knowing whether Monzo accepts payable orders).

(Alex Sherwood) split this topic #20

8 posts were split to a new topic: Multiple ATM withdrawal failures