Customer Support Quality & Response Times

It’s all a bit rubbish, really. I had a transaction declined, and want to know why. The current response time is 14 hours. :man_shrugging:

6 Likes

Did transaction @ 1.26pm today they still haven’t received it. & chat been waiting 2 1/2 hours :rage:

In contrast, I made a purchase on my Starling debit card last Saturday and on Tuesday morning I had a failed transaction notification. I contacted Starling straight away through the in app live message chat to find out what had happened and I was answered within 1 minute and the explanation was all done and dusted with a couple of minutes. The transaction had been put through as an offline transaction and I’d frozen my card about 30 minutes after my purchase. I unfroze my card and the transaction went through within minutes. My point is that Starling’s CS is spot on, something that perhaps Monzo should be striving to equal?..

4 Likes

I haven’t had the opportunity to use Monzo customer support luckily but have done with Starling a few times and no complaints there.

2 Likes

Reminds me of the old days of Monzo. I was under the impression that Monzo had taken steps to ensure this didn’t happen again. Those steps would appear to be insufficient this time round.

4 Likes

I wonder if it’s still costing £8 a year per customer to provide CS

Edit: I’m sure I’ve seen more recent figures, but can’t find them

1 Like

We have. The main thing that was done was to make sure that we had the ability to scale support capacity up as queues increased by having different options to increase capacity. I’m sure somebody from the support teams can chime in with what exactly these options are. :slightly_smiling_face:

This situation we’re in right now is fairly unfortunate (marketing push plus Faster Payments outage plus some merchant issues all in one week) but from the dashboard we have in Card Payments (we often use support numbers as customers are usually the fastest to tell us if something outside what we can monitor is or is not working such as payments at individual merchants), it’s coming back under control.

If you do require immediate support, please remember to mark your message as urgent. Wait times for urgent conversations are currently roughly ten minutes.

8 Likes

How do you mark a message as urgent if you already have an existing thread? It only seems to pop up initially (if that makes sense). Obviously an issue can go from not being as urgent, to urgent. How does a user notify support of that?

7 Likes

Not sure if it’s been mentioned above but having a transparent 7 day running average of the following on their website would be an interesting idea:

  • number of queries dealt with.
  • average wait time for urgent and non urgent queries.
  • average resolution for urgent and non urgent queries.

I know monzo are trying but displaying this data would always keep them accountable and on their toes.

6 Likes

Good idea, even legacy banks have a “estimated wait time”

Though I usually find that the estimated wait time is just pulled out of thin air

Thanks for the reply. It’s great that Monzo staff often reach out this way.

My request isn’t urgent, although I didn’t have an opportunity to mark it one way or the other.

2 Likes

You get the option when you first message

I hadn’t had a reply to my question for almost a week, I looked today and it had been closed.

I questioned this with the agent and they said that my enquiry was ‘paused’ and due to the delays it meant that an agent didn’t pick it up for 3 days at which point it was automatically closed.

Thankfully it wasn’t anything important but if you’re experiencing delays perhaps you need to look at adjusting the ‘auto close’ functionality as I can’t see this helping at all.

5 Likes

Last time I spoke to them I didn’t get the option.

Maybe A/B testing?

4 Likes

Which seems to mean that if my first message isn’t urgent, none of the subsequent messages will be urgent.

3 Likes

Correct :slight_smile:

I believe that a COp has to close your enquiry before you can start a new one which gives you the option of marking it urgent or not.

Perhaps being given the option to change the priority at anytime would help?

7 Likes

There’s something like this on the krystal.co.uk home page (about half way down) which really like - shows the number of operators online, average call time etc

1 Like

I mean… let’s face it - having the urgency option at a bank is a bit weird. If I’m contacting my bank, in my opinion not urgent = within the same day and urgent = within the same minute for the first reply from a real human - it’s called “chat with us” not “send a message and start praying”.

If you’re going to implement bots to try and fix the problem, let them tell me my current estimated queue time and nothing more - getting a ping of “we’ve got your message and someone will be with you soon” is a waste of everyone’s time Whoops, I’m wrong - see below

And while I’m apparently stuck in the stirrups of my high horse, why does it give me push notifications for bot messages when I’m already on the chat page? Might just be me but… seems a bit weird

This seems to be a far more basic problem than just CS getting overloaded. There has to be better escalation and triage than this!

1 Like

Closing support requests automatically when a Cops team member hasn’t even replied yet is… an interesting implementation. I’d quite like to know what the person who built that was thinking at the time but that’s besides the point

4 Likes